mudcrabs
mudcrabs
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Apparently I need to include:
1) The URL for the video.
2) The presenter and relevant biographical information.
3) The main philosophical point presented.
4) My thoughts about support given for that point.
Problem is I doubt I will have any strong opinion on any of these things because barely any of them have to do with pressing issues faced by the working class.
1) The URL for the video.
2) The presenter and relevant biographical information.
3) The main philosophical point presented.
4) My thoughts about support given for that point.
Problem is I doubt I will have any strong opinion on any of these things because barely any of them have to do with pressing issues faced by the working class.
shennong
shennong
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mudcrabs posted:
barely any of them have to do with pressing issues faced by the working class.
cosmological proofs for god's existence
littlegreenpills
littlegreenpills
Poronto
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mudcrabs posted:
barely any of them have to do with pressing issues faced by the working class.
pragmatism, language and reality can be related to em shurely. linguistic determination of social atomization i dunno. i did my undergrad at chef school
littlegreenpills
littlegreenpills
Poronto
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my thesis was on game birds in aspic
mudcrabs
mudcrabs
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So I took a look at "Bacon's Method of Scientific Induction" and it's literally just a video giving a Bacon quote about induction and then explaining how it's connected to scientific reasoning. It doesn't actually argue anything so I don't think 3 and 4 can be applied.
Impper
Impper
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deadken posted:
creative writing class exercise TWO yall. based on one of my own posts, here at tHE r H i z z o n E. i havent slept in.... a while
In sci-fi films the monsters are always disgusting. They ooze fluids from every pore, their exoskeletons glisten with mucus, their digestive juices slop about in wide arcs, their goo splatters everywhere once our heroes inevitably blow them up. That’s us. It’s not the unknown that really scares us, it’s ourselves. It fascinates us too.
I’m in the food court of a mall in San Antonio, watching people eat. One guy in particular, a fat old geezer in one of those motorised wheelchairs. He lifts the cheeseburger up to his face. As he bites into it the crumbs stick to the grease surrounding his mouth, the oil runs in rivulets down his face, little specks of gristle wedge themselves inbetween his teeth. When he eats the skin hanging down from his neck sways from side to side. Ripples pass across it, as slow and solemn as the tides. He’s not looking in any particular direction, he just stares into the hazy distance, his eyes moistening with – with what? Regret? Shame? Self-loathing? I wish, but it’s unlikely. I don’t really care. It’s hard to feel sorry for him.
I can see it all. I can see the blood rushing through his fat-clogged arteries, the phlegm in the back of his throat that gives his breath its laboured wheeze, the yeasty cells swarming in the pits and folds of his belly. His jeans are rubbing against his thighs; the skin there is breaking out in livid sores; the pus bubbles away just underneath. His ears are caked with wax, slimy stuff, clotted with particles of dust. Somewhere in the fetid depths of his gut the walls of his gut are pulsing and contracting, squeezing a half-formed turd along inch by gruesome inch.
The burger is finished; now he’s moving on to the chips. He grabs a couple with one swollen hand, he smears them in the ketchup, he shoves them roughly into his mouth. A big gulp of Coke. More stray liquid drips courses down his cheeks, collecting in little puddles around the stubble that bristles from his skin. I see the burp shuddering in his chest before it bursts out and his lips wobble about like plates of jelly. A light spray of saliva splatters against his plate, mingling with the juices from his meal.
A few tables down two girls are eating with their mother. They’re seventeen, maybe; their cheeks are flush with enthusiasm, their chatter fills the air with spittle, their nostrils are plugged with mucus, stringy conduits squirm and writhe inside their bodies. They seem to hardly notice that the spectre of their future is just across from them. She sits glumly, her sour, defeated look telling me all I need to know: she has a wardrobe full of polyester pantsuits and a big grey minivan, there’s a bottle of Diazepam on the bathroom counter of her sprawling bungalow in the suburbs. Eventually she’ll grow tired with it all and die; the kids will cry about it for a while, then they'll slowly start to forget. The microbes will disperse her fluids through the soil.
I don’t eat much these days; some dry crackers, occasionally, with a glass of water. I’ve given up on sex entirely – all that grunting and sweating and squirting; I don’t miss it at all, it’s better to observe people from a distance. I’m smoking a lot; I’ve grown quite attached to amphetamines. I've learned to make do with one or two hours of sleep a night. My friends tell me I’m wasting away; they say it in voices dripping with self-righteous concern. I’ve never felt more alive. Once you detach yourself from the world you can see it for what it is. It’s a joke. It’s all one big joke, and only I seem to get it.
i kno it doesnt mean much for me to praise whatever u write but this is really damn good
Impper
Impper
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tentativelurker that was one of the most interesting/cool sentences i've seen in a while.
deadken
deadken
penitent
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cheers br0
Crow
Crow
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shennong posted:mudcrabs posted:
barely any of them have to do with pressing issues faced by the working class.cosmological proofs for god's existence
so youre saying this sort of proof is absolutely impossible to produce, and to even presuppose its existence it must be pulled out of your Ass 
Crow
Crow
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but yea pull it out of your ass, silly 
shennong
shennong
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Crow posted:
but yea pull it out of your ass, silly
god is closer than your internal iliac vein
deadken
deadken
penitent
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I WROTE A FIVE THOUSAND WORD STORY FOR MY WORKSHOP AND OF COURSE I'M GOING TO POST IT, HERE, AT THE RHIZZONE
deadken
deadken
penitent
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ATLANTIS
I started giving cigarettes to the homeless. That’s how it all began.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, they’d terrified me a little. Well, everything had terrified me a little. The flat infinity of the city, the postapocalyptic emptiness of its streets, the harsh blank gazes of the strip-mall windows, the fury of the motorists, the pervasive anonymity and its constant gasping hunger for fame. It was so unlike the familiar crowded clutter of Europe: cities there hold you close in a maternal embrace; often they’re abusive mothers, but even if they’re actively trying to kill you at least they care enough to want you dead. Los Angeles is indifferent. I’d taken a drive through South Central, and what scared me most about the place was how identical it was to everywhere else: the same skeletal palm trees, the same uneven pavements, the same low bungalows with the same architectural inconsistency. But the homeless gave me a special kind of terror: I’d hear them yelping into the night as I walked drunk along Santa Monica Boulevard, howling like coyotes; I’d see their sleeping shapes in shopfronts, looking somehow coiled, ready to spring into a furious assault. There was one man who sat on a metal bench near my apartment, wearing a bulky green overcoat half-shredded into a mess of tangled fibres. He’d mutter softly to himself most of the time; sometimes he’d bark at people passing by. Once, while arriving home, I met his gaze for a single excruciating second. The lines in his face were slimy with grease, his beard was matted with blood and dirt, but his eyes were a cold hard blue and completely clear. I wondered what was happening in his head. I wondered what line separated me from him. I wondered how easy it would be for me to end up like he was. The Californian heat was enough to drive anyone mad; it bred prophets like swampland breeds mosquitoes.
It didn’t last that long. I got used to them. I saw how my new Angeleno friends behaved: people from my office and my apartment building, they were all good people with solid liberal principles, but they acted as if the homeless simply didn’t exist, as if they were drifting phantoms that had hallucinated themselves into being. I felt guilty about it at first, but I started to do the same. The city was packed with ghosts. Sitting impatiently on a bus as it lurched haltingly towards the smog-shrouded spires of Downtown, I pretended to ignore the fat black woman in a hospital gown singing gospel songs and drumming on the stinking plastic bags that carried all her possessions. Walking with groceries, I tried to forget the plaintive looks that emerged from every underpass. I kept my headphones and sunglasses on at all times, I sank into the music, so that the bright scorching world around me faded into a blur. It worked, to an extent.
“Spare a smoke, man?”
I was on Hollywood Boulevard; I can’t remember why – it’s a dump, frankly; I think I’d gone up there to buy some tacky gifts for friends back home. It was a hot day, even in the hills; an oppressive dull gleam shone from every surface, the blue sky throbbed with a feverish intensity. I was smoking, despite the dirty looks I got from Americans on the street, despite the sticky heat in the back of my throat. He was a young man with a short beard, hugging his knees in the entrance to an abandoned souvenir store, an overflowing rucksack propped up against the wall next to him.
“Sorry,” I mumbled instinctually, not meeting his eyes. “It’s my last one.” I carried on walking, quickening my pace a little, stamping on the names of forgotten celebrities, when I felt something shift inside me. Maybe it was my conscience. Maybe it was just the swarm of fat Midwestern tourists flitting about on the street around me with their sweatpatches and their gaping hungry mouths. I didn’t want to be like them.
I turned back. “I lied,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I took a cigarette out of my packet and held it out in his general direction. He took it without a smile.
“God bless,” he mumbled.
After that I started giving cigarettes to the homeless. I never stopped to talk to them, I never even stayed long enough to register their thanks – they still made me uneasy. I knew I wasn’t really helping; after all, I was giving them cancer. Still, it made me feel a little better; at least I wasn’t ignoring their existence.
It was a couple of weeks before I saw him again. The man I had given my first cigarette to was kneeling in a sleeping bag next to a fast food place not far from my apartment building, trying to position a purple-bound book in the dim streetlight.
“Are you hungry?” I said to him.
He looked at me quizzically. “Always.” He peered at me for a second. “Hey. Ain’t you the cigarette guy? I remember a face, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” I went inside.
I came out with two burgers and sat down next to him. “What’s the book?” I said.
“Oh, it’s the Bible. Got me through a lot of tough times. Better out here than out in combat.”
“You’re a vet?”
“Iraq. Three tours. I saw some shit out there, I can tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“Not like buddies getting killed, you know. I mean, it happened, but I was never there…” He flung up his hands. “I was at Camp Alpha. You know where that is?”
“No.”
“Babylon, man. We built this base right in the ruins of Babylon. It was all reconstructed by Saddam. But still. We’d be getting drunk at night and running round all these ancient buildings, climbing over these statues to gods, and we didn’t even know their names. It just felt like… at night it was like they was staring at you. You could almost hear ‘em chanting, like these deep ancient chants…” He looked down and started to unwrap the burger. “You gotta think I’m crazy. It’s just, you know, I don’t get to talk to people all that often.”
“Not at all.”
“It was just like, shit, I never even finished high school and I’m walking round Babylon. I was a fucking dumbass nineteen year old, and I was meant to be teaching these guys – the Iraqis – about democracy, when it was them that invented the whole thing – architecture, government, writing for fuck’s sake. I didn’t know that. By the end of it, when I kept getting called back, I was pissed as hell. Punched my CO right in the face after he kept going off on some hajji bullshit. Then I got my big chicken dinner – shit; BCD, bad conduct discharge – and, you know, the rest…”
We ate in silence for a while. When I left I reached out to shake his hand.
“You didn’t ask my name,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You apologise a lot. I’m Brandon. Brandon Leigh.”
Brandon slept on the street in Skid Row. Every day he took the bus up to Hollywood or the Westside to panhandle. I think he must have worked out that I lived in Santa Monica; most days I’d see him sitting on the street not far from my apartment building. I didn’t mind. I would buy him some fast food and he’d tell me stories from the war – or one story, at least. Brandon was fixated on a single image: four young Americans cavorting through the ruins of Babylon, and one of them suddenly stopping, feeling a cold breath down the back of his neck, the chill of something vast and hungry and incomparably ancient. He didn’t believe in the gods of Mesopotamia; he was a good Christian, after all. It was something else: a vibe, he said. A terrifying vibe.
“Why do you do this?” he asked one day. “It’s not like I’m not grateful or nothing. But you gotta admit it’s pretty weird. Most folks here just ignore people like me.”
“I’m not from here,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t like to ignore things. I want to experience everything.”
“You been to Skid Row yet, man?”
“I’ve been past it.”
“If you wanna experience everything, that’s where you gotta go. I’ll show you round.”
Brandon and I took the bus to Skid Row that weekend. We rode in silence through the sterile skyscraper-speckled landscape of Bunker Hill. After that the terrain became flatter; the Art Deco flourishes of the buildings to the West faded into squat white warehouses, car parks, empty lots in which a few stray tufts of grass shivered. Slowly the streets became more and more crowded: people wandering aimlessly, sitting in doorways, lying supine on the pavement, squatting next to their tents. The low cityscape was broken by the odd old brick building with a spluttering neon sign. The shopfronts were all boarded up. Paint peeled from the facades of the buildings.
“Welcome to America’s only Third World city,” said Brandon as we stepped off the bus.
The stench was overpowering. Rotting waste, sewerage, old urine, body odour. A tide of litter lapped against the kerbside. The ground was sticky beneath my feet. Most of the people that thronged the street stood silently. A few chattered continuously in a low mumble. Through the day’s haze the brooding grey shapes of the towers to the west could just be made out, monolithic and threatening.
Brandon followed my gaze. “I don’t wanna make this a race thing,” he said. “But you gotta admit, most of the folks out here are black. And most of the folks up there are white.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I went back a few days later. Brandon introduced me to some of his neighbours. Some of them mumbled politely. Some were silent; they wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“It’s not much,” he said afterwards. “But it’s a community.”
“More a community than most places in this city,” I said.
“Ain’t that true.” He stood up. “Listen. There’s this church near here, they do shave and a shower… reckon you could just watch my things? Fifteen minutes. Police’ll confiscate it otherwise.”
I waited, reading Brandon’s Bible. I was halfway through II Corinthians when I was approached by two people: a tall woman in black jeans with her dark hair cut short and skin as pale as porcelain, and a scrawny acned guy in a polo shirt slightly too big for him. The woman crouched down next to me. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Molly and this is Tim. We’re from the Brotherton Foundation.”
“Hi,” I said, and told her my name. I extended a hand. She didn’t shake it.
“You have an accent… are you documented? You can tell us. It’s purely confidential.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have a work visa.”
Molly’s brow furrowed. “You’re not-”
“I’m not homeless,” I said.
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry. It’s just we try to keep track of all the guys here, so that if something happens to them… what are you doing here?”
“I’m watching someone’s stuff for him.”
She peered at the rucksack. “Brandon?”
“That’s impressive.”
She shrugged. “It’s my job. Who are you with? I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I don’t work with a charity. I just… I just come here sometimes.”
“That’s weird.” She gave a wry smile. “Are you writing a novel or something? Listen, our office is on Sixth. You should drop round some time.”
My visits to Skid Row became more and more frequent. Most days I’d spend an hour or so there after work, sometimes giving out cigarettes and burgers, sometimes just talking to the residents. Many of them were suspicious at first; they didn’t know what I wanted from them. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure either. I got to know the eccentrics of the neighbourhood: Megan, the dumpster-diving daughter of a Silicon Valley millionaire who wore clothes stitched from palm leaves and insisted that she had been a yeast infection in a previous life; Bertrand, a wizened old man who walked around naked pontificating in aristocratic tones about the continuing relevance of Hellenic Classicism as a model for the worthy life; Rhonda, a drag queen whose shopping trolley was filled with discarded cosmetics she’d found in bins across the city; Colin, who went to an internet café every day to record a rambling videoblog. I ran into Molly occasionally, often with Tim as well; we gave each other a nod of recognition and sometimes chatted for a few minutes. I never did drop into the office. I think my presence confused her a little.
It wasn’t always pleasant. I saw paramedics fret furiously as a woman gave birth on the street, surrounded by shit and muck. I saw an argument between two men escalate suddenly into a knife fight; their lumpy overcoated forms circled and darted with an almost balletic fluidity. I saw near-spherical Latina prostitutes drag their patrons into Portaloos, I saw emaciated junkies whose eyes darted about from the bottom of dark cavernous pits, I saw men vomiting blood and oozing pus. It was never dull, though. Everyone there believed in something grand and cosmic: Brandon had his spirits of Mesopotamia, Megan her hippie Hinduism. Most had their own hobo variations on Christianity, some had intricate conspiracy theories – they saw demons and aliens behind the placid faces of the comfortable Angelenos who walked past them, carefully ignoring their existence. I had a long theological conversation with a recovering junkie who’d joined a twelve-step programme at one of the local churches.
“There’s two powers in this world,” he told me. “There’s the Light. That’s the blood of Christ. Then there’s the darkness. That’s the tar. The darkness draws you in. It makes you all safe and comfortable. The Light hurts. But the Light is life and the tar is death, and that’s all there is to it. You can’t receive the blood of Christ while your own blood is still full of the tar.” He coughed. “Do you know Christ as your saviour?”
“I do,” I lied.
“God bless, God bless you. The dark does bad things for you. It made me steal from my momma. It made me want to hurt my fellow man. That shit even got me kicked out of Atlantis-” He stopped, suddenly, with the stricken look of someone who’s said something they shouldn’t have said.
“What’s Atlantis?”
“It’s a bunkhouse near here,” he said hurriedly. “They don’t take no junkies. Don’t blame ‘em.”
I saw Molly the next day. “What’s Atlantis?” I asked her.
She and Tim were taking a lunch break, eating quesadillas on a bench by a bus stop. She had a smudge of guacamole by the corner of her lip. I didn’t mention it.
“It’s a myth,” she said.
“Not the legend. Something here called Atlantis.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a myth. OK. The story goes that back in the Nineties a bunch of homeless people started living in the disused subway lines under Los Angeles. We actually used to have the best public transport system in the country, but it all got closed down during the Depression… anyway, they’re supposed to have built this whole underground city of the homeless. Like two hundred thousand people. With electricity, even. They hook themselves up to power lines. And they’ve got common ownership over everything. There’s all these houses down there but they don’t belong to anyone, they sleep in a different place every night. So their society doesn’t make the same mistake as ours. A lot of the guys believe in it. You can see why, really.”
“But it doesn’t exist.”
She smiled. “Well, we can’t know. But no. It doesn’t exist.”
“Yesterday someone told me he’d been there.”
“A lot of the guys came out of psych wards, you know. They’re not always reliable.”
“He seemed pretty cogent.”
Tim leaned over. “If you’re into all that kooky shit you should talk to Roy Kelner,” he said. “This philosophy professor up at UCLA. He used to come down here every weekend and talk about Atlantis. He really believed in it.”
I took down the name.
It was slow at first. Sometimes I’d idly wonder if I was unknowingly walking directly above Atlantis. I asked a few more people on Skid Row what they knew about it. Many of them believed in it. Only a few claimed to have been there, but their descriptions were rambling and contradictory: Atlantis was populated entirely by horny white women, Atlantis was decked out with chrome and holographic screens, Atlantis was a humid jungle miles below the Earth’s surface, Atlantis existed across a portal to another dimension. I never saw the junkie evangelist again; I talked to Molly but she couldn’t recognise him from my description. I started trying to draw pictures of the place, shakily to begin with – I’d abandoned my art some years before. The first attempt looked like a subterranean Skid Row. Chiaroscuro against a background of tangled wires and scuffed brickwork I drew bodies slumped against the walls of corrugated-iron shacks. Bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceilings gave long shadows to the piles of litter between the train tracks and the piss and shit running down the walls; in one corner a mange-bitten rat posed dramatically on its hind legs. It didn’t look right: this was not Atlantis. I tried again. This time, I decided that the founders of Atlantis had had the subway tunnels faced with white marble. Shining chandeliers were placed at regular intervals; they bathed everything in a soft crepuscular glow. Jutting from the walls were Ionic colonnades; here and there were fountains and statues depicting the gods and heroes of the homeless. The citizens of Atlantis were drawn strolling around at a leisurely pace, naked, with beards and long glossy hair. They slept wherever they pleased, on the steps of the various temples and academies, or on the long grass strewn with wildflowers that had been planted on the floor of the tunnel. Only the wires and pipes running through the ceilings and the odd subway car converted into living spaces served to remind that this was not some supernatural realm but a city buried under the streets of Los Angeles. I discarded that one too: what I had drawn was a fantasy; I knew that a real Atlantis existed. My third attempt was closer to the truth, I think. Why would the Atlanteans, who had successfully hidden their city from the world for decades, be content to live in the spaces carved out by Los Angeles? What if they had continued to excavate, broadening the abandoned subway lines until they all converged? I drew an immense cavern, crisscrossed by flaking girders from which bundles of power lines hung loosely. Floodlights were bolted to some of them, a glittering constellation of floodlights, shooting beams of light in random paths, revealing fragments of the vast city below. Atlantis was a bric-a-brac mess; its streets were a tangled scribble, like those of a medina or a medieval town. The buildings were all in irregular shapes, built on top of each other; none had all four walls made from the same material. Winding around and between them were more wires, ziplines, staircases, slides, hidden passages, secret entrances. Towards the centre was a cluster of skyscrapers not unlike those in the city above, but these too were wreathed in twisting ramps and staircases, like ivy around the trunk of a tree. Atlantis was a schizophrenic city, but it was consistent in its own logic; its anarchy was a warm and human one, a necessary counterpoint to the cold, rational gridded psychopathy of Los Angeles. I kept the drawing in a drawer in my apartment. I never showed it to anyone.
The next week, I called in sick at work and decided to find Roy Kelner. The UCLA campus was broad and open, dotted with green spaces. Little kids ran between the trees, shrieking unintelligibly. Musclebound students in vests and sunglasses bumped fists as they crossed paths with each other and walked on without saying a word. In front of one building a gaggle of earnest-looking types were protesting against something or other. I asked for Roy Kelner at the front desk in the Philosophy department.
The receptionist frowned. “I don’t think I know him. Hang on.” She tapped at her keyboard. “K-E-L-N-E-R? I don’t think there’s anyone by that name here.”
Another woman’s face appeared from behind a doorway. “You’re looking for Kelner? He doesn’t work here anymore.”
“He got fired?”
“Not exactly. Is this about Atlantis?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Yeah, we get people asking about that sometimes. One guy wanted to make a documentary about him. Kelner was my professor when I was at grad school here. He got really weird about it, to be honest. We were meant to be doing Contemporary Continentalism and all he’d ever do was talk about Atlantis. Obsessed. He was so certain that it existed. And then one day he just vanishes. No note, nothing.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he found Atlantis. Who knows? I’m sorry I can’t help. He did write a book about it, though. The Impossibility of the Real: Theorizing Atlantis. He put it on our required reading list.”
“You don’t have a copy, do you?”
“’Fraid not. They should have one at the Powell Library, though. It’s just across the quad.”
The library swarmed with students tapping away at their laptops: I only saw one, a dark-haired girl in green leggings, who was actually reading a book. Kelner’s book was very slim; more of a pamphlet, really. Underneath the title was a painting I recognised as Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego. I opened it a few pages in:
The homeless operate according to a temporal and special paradigm that constitutes a nomadic smooth-space disruption of the striations of space as interpreted by the State. They manifest themselves not as a series of molar entities but as a single substance engaged in a total deterritorialisation: their model is not that of the herd but that of the swarm.
I flipped forwards a few pages:
Here it may be valuable to consider the development of the subterranean city in terms of Negarestani’s ( )hole complex and his conceptualization of solidus and void.
Towards the end:
Hardt & Negri’s assertion that resistance is ontologically prior to power provides a reversal of traditional social dynamics that allows for a wealth of new theoretical approaches. Similarly, a richer understanding may be achieved if it is postulated that it is, in fact, Los Angeles that forms a vast parasite on Atlantis; a teeming, grossly over-extended remora-city whose inhabitants live out their lives unaware their existences form a superficial manifestation of a far more profound reality. Los Angeles, home to the entertainment industry and epicenter of global spectacularity, is constructed of artifice and simulacrum; it is only its leech-like attachment to Atlantis that prevents the entire city from drifting off into the air. It is the tellurian powers of Atlantis that maintain, direct, and control the nature of existence in the surface-city. The lack of popular recognition for the city’s dark twin and the official denials of its existence do not demonstrate that it is unreal; rather, they demonstrate that in the society of the spectacle, the Real unavoidably takes on the aspects of myth.
Before long I stopped going to work entirely. I’d spend my days in Skid Row and my nights doing feverish research in my apartment. A few of my friends still called me occasionally, but after a while they started to drift away. I scoured the Internet for maps of the tunnels under Los Angeles and started looking up prices for mead-mounted torches. I read accounts from other people who’d spent hours traipsing around the catacombs of the city trying to find Atlantis. I knew why they’d failed: they were trying to invade Atlantis, to plant their flag on its soil. To go there one had to be invited in. I thought about trying to contact Kelner – even if he’d found Atlantis maybe he still read the paper; I could place an advert in the Los Angeles Times. My trips to the laundry became sparse. I stopped shaving; I trimmed my beard occasionally, when I had the time. My jeans frayed at the cuffs. I didn’t replace them.
I was sitting on the kerbside, smoking a solitary cigarette, when I saw Molly running past me. “It’s Jerome!” she said.
I followed her. Around the corner, a moustachioed cop was wrestling for control of a shopping trolley with a wiry old man in a ragged t-shirt. Molly stopped next to them.
“Sir,” she said, panting. “What’s happening here?”
“I’d stand back if I were you, miss,” said the cop.
“What’s happening?” she said again.
The old man fixed Molly with a frenzied stare and shook his jowls, liberally dousing us in spittle. “They wan’ my treasures!” he said. “Stop ‘em, Moll! Buzzers! Bluebottles! They wanna take my treasures!”
“Let him keep them,” said Molly. “Sir, he’s not hurting anyone.”
“Your man here has a shopping cart full of bottles of his own urine,” said the cop. “It’s a public safety hazard.”
“It’s all Jerome has,” she said.
Jerome made a lunge for the cop’s waist. “Buzzers away!” he roared. The cop pushed him to the ground and cuffed him. Jerome writhed desperately. “A-da-da,” he moaned. “A-da-da-da. Not my golden. I made it myself. Stop ‘em, Moll.”
“What’s your badge number?” said Molly. “I’m going to make a complaint.”
Jerome’s head darted upwards and struck the cop on his chin. “My treasures!” he roared. The cop truncheoned him in the back of the neck. Molly rushed towards the trolley.
“Stand back!” shouted the cop. With one knee now on Jerome’s neck, he pulled a Taser from his belt. “Not one step!”
“Or what?” said Molly. “You’ll shoot me? Give him his things back!” She reached out to grab the trolley handle. The cop fired: there was a sudden crack of electricity, and two darts arced out to Molly’s chest. She fell over backwards. Her head hit the pavement with a dull thud. One arm twitched. Jerome shrieked. I rushed over to her. There was another crack. The world flashed a searing white.
“Jesus Christ,” said Molly as we walked back around the corner, defeated. “Fuck. I need a drink.”
“Shouldn’t you go to a hospital or something?”
“I’m Irish. I need a drink. I’m going back to the office. I’m going to have a drink and them I’m going to get that fucker fired. You want one?”
“It’s only five in the afternoon… what am I saying? Of course. I’d love one.”
The office was, as it turned out, two small rooms over a dollar store, half-buried in papers and ring binders. “As you can see, we’re not the most well-funded organisation out here,” said Molly, reaching into a drawer and withdrawing a bottle of whiskey. She took a big glug. “I hope you don’t mind drinking from the bottle.”
I laughed. “Reminds me of being a kid.”
Molly sat down on an overstuffed sofa leaning against one wall and beckoned me to join her. “Where do you work?” she said. “I don’t think I even asked.”
“At this accountancy firm. It’s not very interesting.”
“So what makes a guy who works at an accountancy firm suddenly decide to spend all his time on Skid Row?”
“I wasn’t always an office drone. I used to be-” I paused.
“What?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I used to write graphic novels. Unpublished, of course.”
“That’s cool. What were they about?”
“Superheroes… my thing was superheroes with boring powers. I did a whole series about a guy who had laser eyes, but they were only good for scanning barcodes at the supermarket.”
Molly laughed. “That’d go some way to explaining your obsession with Atlantis.”
“What about you? How’d you end up working here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I came down here for college, from a tiny whitebread town up in NorCal, and I was just so upset by it all… you know, two months in and I was a radical feminist and an anti-poverty campaigner and everything. I just wanted to help, I guess.” Molly stood up. “Do you like blues?” she said, walking over to a CD player in the corner of the office.
“Sure,” I said.
She pushed a button. A few dusty-sounding guitar notes sounded out. As she walked back Molly swayed her hips a little, clicking one hand, staring slightly bashfully at the floor.
“My dad only ever had one record,” she said, sitting down next to me. “He’d play it the whole time in the car. Robert Johnson. You know him?”
“Isn’t that the guy who sold his soul to the Devil?”
“At the crossroads, yeah. It’s actually all based on this Yoruba legend. It’s not necessarily the Devil. It’s Eshu. The spirit of the crossroads.”
I thought of Brandon, hearing the voices of dead gods in the ruins of Babylon. “There’s myth everywhere. Under the surface.”
Molly gave me a strange look. “You’re such a Romantic,” she said.
“Aren’t I just.” I slid an arm over her shoulders and leant towards her.
“Oh, knock it off.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a fucking compliment! Why are you here? I’ve seen you. All you talk to the guys is about is Atlantis. This tooth fairy legend! Like they don’t matter. There are real people suffering out there, and you come down here because – because what? You find it interesting? You get some sick aesthetic enjoyment out of their misery?”
“That’s not true,” I said, not fully believing myself.
“Yes it is! You don’t really care, do you? You’re interested, but you don’t care.”
“You’re drunk.”
“It’s still true. You don’t give a shit about anyone apart from yourself.”
I stared at the floor. “I don’t know how to.”
Molly stood up. “Please go,” she said. “I’d feel a lot better if you- please, just go.”
I didn’t go back to Skid Row the next day. I sat around listlessly in my apartment, watching TV, trying not to think about Atlantis. That afternoon I had a less than friendly visit from two officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They explained as I packed my possessions that, as I hadn’t shown up for work in weeks, my visa was no longer valid. On the flight back, I stared out the window as the desert melted into the vast flat cornfields of the Midwest, as the Appalachians soared past me, as the interminable expanse of the Atlantic was finally broken by a rolling patchwork of tiny constricted fields. I was home, back in that crowded little space where all the ancient myths died out centuries ago.
I manage. Friends and family were surprised to see me back so early; when I tried to explain what had happened I could tell that they didn’t really understand. I have a job, and my old apartment again. I’ve given up drawing altogether, which is probably for the best. Most of the time I don’t even think about it. But whenever in one of those moments of blankness my mind floats away from its surroundings – when I’m in the shower, or on public transport, or bored at the office – it always goes to the same place. I float through the miles of empty tunnels under Los Angeles, chasing the faint gleam of a light that is always close but never within reach, searching for Atlantis.
I started giving cigarettes to the homeless. That’s how it all began.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, they’d terrified me a little. Well, everything had terrified me a little. The flat infinity of the city, the postapocalyptic emptiness of its streets, the harsh blank gazes of the strip-mall windows, the fury of the motorists, the pervasive anonymity and its constant gasping hunger for fame. It was so unlike the familiar crowded clutter of Europe: cities there hold you close in a maternal embrace; often they’re abusive mothers, but even if they’re actively trying to kill you at least they care enough to want you dead. Los Angeles is indifferent. I’d taken a drive through South Central, and what scared me most about the place was how identical it was to everywhere else: the same skeletal palm trees, the same uneven pavements, the same low bungalows with the same architectural inconsistency. But the homeless gave me a special kind of terror: I’d hear them yelping into the night as I walked drunk along Santa Monica Boulevard, howling like coyotes; I’d see their sleeping shapes in shopfronts, looking somehow coiled, ready to spring into a furious assault. There was one man who sat on a metal bench near my apartment, wearing a bulky green overcoat half-shredded into a mess of tangled fibres. He’d mutter softly to himself most of the time; sometimes he’d bark at people passing by. Once, while arriving home, I met his gaze for a single excruciating second. The lines in his face were slimy with grease, his beard was matted with blood and dirt, but his eyes were a cold hard blue and completely clear. I wondered what was happening in his head. I wondered what line separated me from him. I wondered how easy it would be for me to end up like he was. The Californian heat was enough to drive anyone mad; it bred prophets like swampland breeds mosquitoes.
It didn’t last that long. I got used to them. I saw how my new Angeleno friends behaved: people from my office and my apartment building, they were all good people with solid liberal principles, but they acted as if the homeless simply didn’t exist, as if they were drifting phantoms that had hallucinated themselves into being. I felt guilty about it at first, but I started to do the same. The city was packed with ghosts. Sitting impatiently on a bus as it lurched haltingly towards the smog-shrouded spires of Downtown, I pretended to ignore the fat black woman in a hospital gown singing gospel songs and drumming on the stinking plastic bags that carried all her possessions. Walking with groceries, I tried to forget the plaintive looks that emerged from every underpass. I kept my headphones and sunglasses on at all times, I sank into the music, so that the bright scorching world around me faded into a blur. It worked, to an extent.
“Spare a smoke, man?”
I was on Hollywood Boulevard; I can’t remember why – it’s a dump, frankly; I think I’d gone up there to buy some tacky gifts for friends back home. It was a hot day, even in the hills; an oppressive dull gleam shone from every surface, the blue sky throbbed with a feverish intensity. I was smoking, despite the dirty looks I got from Americans on the street, despite the sticky heat in the back of my throat. He was a young man with a short beard, hugging his knees in the entrance to an abandoned souvenir store, an overflowing rucksack propped up against the wall next to him.
“Sorry,” I mumbled instinctually, not meeting his eyes. “It’s my last one.” I carried on walking, quickening my pace a little, stamping on the names of forgotten celebrities, when I felt something shift inside me. Maybe it was my conscience. Maybe it was just the swarm of fat Midwestern tourists flitting about on the street around me with their sweatpatches and their gaping hungry mouths. I didn’t want to be like them.
I turned back. “I lied,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I took a cigarette out of my packet and held it out in his general direction. He took it without a smile.
“God bless,” he mumbled.
After that I started giving cigarettes to the homeless. I never stopped to talk to them, I never even stayed long enough to register their thanks – they still made me uneasy. I knew I wasn’t really helping; after all, I was giving them cancer. Still, it made me feel a little better; at least I wasn’t ignoring their existence.
It was a couple of weeks before I saw him again. The man I had given my first cigarette to was kneeling in a sleeping bag next to a fast food place not far from my apartment building, trying to position a purple-bound book in the dim streetlight.
“Are you hungry?” I said to him.
He looked at me quizzically. “Always.” He peered at me for a second. “Hey. Ain’t you the cigarette guy? I remember a face, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” I went inside.
I came out with two burgers and sat down next to him. “What’s the book?” I said.
“Oh, it’s the Bible. Got me through a lot of tough times. Better out here than out in combat.”
“You’re a vet?”
“Iraq. Three tours. I saw some shit out there, I can tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“Not like buddies getting killed, you know. I mean, it happened, but I was never there…” He flung up his hands. “I was at Camp Alpha. You know where that is?”
“No.”
“Babylon, man. We built this base right in the ruins of Babylon. It was all reconstructed by Saddam. But still. We’d be getting drunk at night and running round all these ancient buildings, climbing over these statues to gods, and we didn’t even know their names. It just felt like… at night it was like they was staring at you. You could almost hear ‘em chanting, like these deep ancient chants…” He looked down and started to unwrap the burger. “You gotta think I’m crazy. It’s just, you know, I don’t get to talk to people all that often.”
“Not at all.”
“It was just like, shit, I never even finished high school and I’m walking round Babylon. I was a fucking dumbass nineteen year old, and I was meant to be teaching these guys – the Iraqis – about democracy, when it was them that invented the whole thing – architecture, government, writing for fuck’s sake. I didn’t know that. By the end of it, when I kept getting called back, I was pissed as hell. Punched my CO right in the face after he kept going off on some hajji bullshit. Then I got my big chicken dinner – shit; BCD, bad conduct discharge – and, you know, the rest…”
We ate in silence for a while. When I left I reached out to shake his hand.
“You didn’t ask my name,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You apologise a lot. I’m Brandon. Brandon Leigh.”
Brandon slept on the street in Skid Row. Every day he took the bus up to Hollywood or the Westside to panhandle. I think he must have worked out that I lived in Santa Monica; most days I’d see him sitting on the street not far from my apartment building. I didn’t mind. I would buy him some fast food and he’d tell me stories from the war – or one story, at least. Brandon was fixated on a single image: four young Americans cavorting through the ruins of Babylon, and one of them suddenly stopping, feeling a cold breath down the back of his neck, the chill of something vast and hungry and incomparably ancient. He didn’t believe in the gods of Mesopotamia; he was a good Christian, after all. It was something else: a vibe, he said. A terrifying vibe.
“Why do you do this?” he asked one day. “It’s not like I’m not grateful or nothing. But you gotta admit it’s pretty weird. Most folks here just ignore people like me.”
“I’m not from here,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t like to ignore things. I want to experience everything.”
“You been to Skid Row yet, man?”
“I’ve been past it.”
“If you wanna experience everything, that’s where you gotta go. I’ll show you round.”
Brandon and I took the bus to Skid Row that weekend. We rode in silence through the sterile skyscraper-speckled landscape of Bunker Hill. After that the terrain became flatter; the Art Deco flourishes of the buildings to the West faded into squat white warehouses, car parks, empty lots in which a few stray tufts of grass shivered. Slowly the streets became more and more crowded: people wandering aimlessly, sitting in doorways, lying supine on the pavement, squatting next to their tents. The low cityscape was broken by the odd old brick building with a spluttering neon sign. The shopfronts were all boarded up. Paint peeled from the facades of the buildings.
“Welcome to America’s only Third World city,” said Brandon as we stepped off the bus.
The stench was overpowering. Rotting waste, sewerage, old urine, body odour. A tide of litter lapped against the kerbside. The ground was sticky beneath my feet. Most of the people that thronged the street stood silently. A few chattered continuously in a low mumble. Through the day’s haze the brooding grey shapes of the towers to the west could just be made out, monolithic and threatening.
Brandon followed my gaze. “I don’t wanna make this a race thing,” he said. “But you gotta admit, most of the folks out here are black. And most of the folks up there are white.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I went back a few days later. Brandon introduced me to some of his neighbours. Some of them mumbled politely. Some were silent; they wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“It’s not much,” he said afterwards. “But it’s a community.”
“More a community than most places in this city,” I said.
“Ain’t that true.” He stood up. “Listen. There’s this church near here, they do shave and a shower… reckon you could just watch my things? Fifteen minutes. Police’ll confiscate it otherwise.”
I waited, reading Brandon’s Bible. I was halfway through II Corinthians when I was approached by two people: a tall woman in black jeans with her dark hair cut short and skin as pale as porcelain, and a scrawny acned guy in a polo shirt slightly too big for him. The woman crouched down next to me. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Molly and this is Tim. We’re from the Brotherton Foundation.”
“Hi,” I said, and told her my name. I extended a hand. She didn’t shake it.
“You have an accent… are you documented? You can tell us. It’s purely confidential.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have a work visa.”
Molly’s brow furrowed. “You’re not-”
“I’m not homeless,” I said.
“Oh, God. I’m so sorry. It’s just we try to keep track of all the guys here, so that if something happens to them… what are you doing here?”
“I’m watching someone’s stuff for him.”
She peered at the rucksack. “Brandon?”
“That’s impressive.”
She shrugged. “It’s my job. Who are you with? I haven’t seen you here before.”
“I don’t work with a charity. I just… I just come here sometimes.”
“That’s weird.” She gave a wry smile. “Are you writing a novel or something? Listen, our office is on Sixth. You should drop round some time.”
My visits to Skid Row became more and more frequent. Most days I’d spend an hour or so there after work, sometimes giving out cigarettes and burgers, sometimes just talking to the residents. Many of them were suspicious at first; they didn’t know what I wanted from them. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure either. I got to know the eccentrics of the neighbourhood: Megan, the dumpster-diving daughter of a Silicon Valley millionaire who wore clothes stitched from palm leaves and insisted that she had been a yeast infection in a previous life; Bertrand, a wizened old man who walked around naked pontificating in aristocratic tones about the continuing relevance of Hellenic Classicism as a model for the worthy life; Rhonda, a drag queen whose shopping trolley was filled with discarded cosmetics she’d found in bins across the city; Colin, who went to an internet café every day to record a rambling videoblog. I ran into Molly occasionally, often with Tim as well; we gave each other a nod of recognition and sometimes chatted for a few minutes. I never did drop into the office. I think my presence confused her a little.
It wasn’t always pleasant. I saw paramedics fret furiously as a woman gave birth on the street, surrounded by shit and muck. I saw an argument between two men escalate suddenly into a knife fight; their lumpy overcoated forms circled and darted with an almost balletic fluidity. I saw near-spherical Latina prostitutes drag their patrons into Portaloos, I saw emaciated junkies whose eyes darted about from the bottom of dark cavernous pits, I saw men vomiting blood and oozing pus. It was never dull, though. Everyone there believed in something grand and cosmic: Brandon had his spirits of Mesopotamia, Megan her hippie Hinduism. Most had their own hobo variations on Christianity, some had intricate conspiracy theories – they saw demons and aliens behind the placid faces of the comfortable Angelenos who walked past them, carefully ignoring their existence. I had a long theological conversation with a recovering junkie who’d joined a twelve-step programme at one of the local churches.
“There’s two powers in this world,” he told me. “There’s the Light. That’s the blood of Christ. Then there’s the darkness. That’s the tar. The darkness draws you in. It makes you all safe and comfortable. The Light hurts. But the Light is life and the tar is death, and that’s all there is to it. You can’t receive the blood of Christ while your own blood is still full of the tar.” He coughed. “Do you know Christ as your saviour?”
“I do,” I lied.
“God bless, God bless you. The dark does bad things for you. It made me steal from my momma. It made me want to hurt my fellow man. That shit even got me kicked out of Atlantis-” He stopped, suddenly, with the stricken look of someone who’s said something they shouldn’t have said.
“What’s Atlantis?”
“It’s a bunkhouse near here,” he said hurriedly. “They don’t take no junkies. Don’t blame ‘em.”
I saw Molly the next day. “What’s Atlantis?” I asked her.
She and Tim were taking a lunch break, eating quesadillas on a bench by a bus stop. She had a smudge of guacamole by the corner of her lip. I didn’t mention it.
“It’s a myth,” she said.
“Not the legend. Something here called Atlantis.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a myth. OK. The story goes that back in the Nineties a bunch of homeless people started living in the disused subway lines under Los Angeles. We actually used to have the best public transport system in the country, but it all got closed down during the Depression… anyway, they’re supposed to have built this whole underground city of the homeless. Like two hundred thousand people. With electricity, even. They hook themselves up to power lines. And they’ve got common ownership over everything. There’s all these houses down there but they don’t belong to anyone, they sleep in a different place every night. So their society doesn’t make the same mistake as ours. A lot of the guys believe in it. You can see why, really.”
“But it doesn’t exist.”
She smiled. “Well, we can’t know. But no. It doesn’t exist.”
“Yesterday someone told me he’d been there.”
“A lot of the guys came out of psych wards, you know. They’re not always reliable.”
“He seemed pretty cogent.”
Tim leaned over. “If you’re into all that kooky shit you should talk to Roy Kelner,” he said. “This philosophy professor up at UCLA. He used to come down here every weekend and talk about Atlantis. He really believed in it.”
I took down the name.
It was slow at first. Sometimes I’d idly wonder if I was unknowingly walking directly above Atlantis. I asked a few more people on Skid Row what they knew about it. Many of them believed in it. Only a few claimed to have been there, but their descriptions were rambling and contradictory: Atlantis was populated entirely by horny white women, Atlantis was decked out with chrome and holographic screens, Atlantis was a humid jungle miles below the Earth’s surface, Atlantis existed across a portal to another dimension. I never saw the junkie evangelist again; I talked to Molly but she couldn’t recognise him from my description. I started trying to draw pictures of the place, shakily to begin with – I’d abandoned my art some years before. The first attempt looked like a subterranean Skid Row. Chiaroscuro against a background of tangled wires and scuffed brickwork I drew bodies slumped against the walls of corrugated-iron shacks. Bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceilings gave long shadows to the piles of litter between the train tracks and the piss and shit running down the walls; in one corner a mange-bitten rat posed dramatically on its hind legs. It didn’t look right: this was not Atlantis. I tried again. This time, I decided that the founders of Atlantis had had the subway tunnels faced with white marble. Shining chandeliers were placed at regular intervals; they bathed everything in a soft crepuscular glow. Jutting from the walls were Ionic colonnades; here and there were fountains and statues depicting the gods and heroes of the homeless. The citizens of Atlantis were drawn strolling around at a leisurely pace, naked, with beards and long glossy hair. They slept wherever they pleased, on the steps of the various temples and academies, or on the long grass strewn with wildflowers that had been planted on the floor of the tunnel. Only the wires and pipes running through the ceilings and the odd subway car converted into living spaces served to remind that this was not some supernatural realm but a city buried under the streets of Los Angeles. I discarded that one too: what I had drawn was a fantasy; I knew that a real Atlantis existed. My third attempt was closer to the truth, I think. Why would the Atlanteans, who had successfully hidden their city from the world for decades, be content to live in the spaces carved out by Los Angeles? What if they had continued to excavate, broadening the abandoned subway lines until they all converged? I drew an immense cavern, crisscrossed by flaking girders from which bundles of power lines hung loosely. Floodlights were bolted to some of them, a glittering constellation of floodlights, shooting beams of light in random paths, revealing fragments of the vast city below. Atlantis was a bric-a-brac mess; its streets were a tangled scribble, like those of a medina or a medieval town. The buildings were all in irregular shapes, built on top of each other; none had all four walls made from the same material. Winding around and between them were more wires, ziplines, staircases, slides, hidden passages, secret entrances. Towards the centre was a cluster of skyscrapers not unlike those in the city above, but these too were wreathed in twisting ramps and staircases, like ivy around the trunk of a tree. Atlantis was a schizophrenic city, but it was consistent in its own logic; its anarchy was a warm and human one, a necessary counterpoint to the cold, rational gridded psychopathy of Los Angeles. I kept the drawing in a drawer in my apartment. I never showed it to anyone.
The next week, I called in sick at work and decided to find Roy Kelner. The UCLA campus was broad and open, dotted with green spaces. Little kids ran between the trees, shrieking unintelligibly. Musclebound students in vests and sunglasses bumped fists as they crossed paths with each other and walked on without saying a word. In front of one building a gaggle of earnest-looking types were protesting against something or other. I asked for Roy Kelner at the front desk in the Philosophy department.
The receptionist frowned. “I don’t think I know him. Hang on.” She tapped at her keyboard. “K-E-L-N-E-R? I don’t think there’s anyone by that name here.”
Another woman’s face appeared from behind a doorway. “You’re looking for Kelner? He doesn’t work here anymore.”
“He got fired?”
“Not exactly. Is this about Atlantis?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“Yeah, we get people asking about that sometimes. One guy wanted to make a documentary about him. Kelner was my professor when I was at grad school here. He got really weird about it, to be honest. We were meant to be doing Contemporary Continentalism and all he’d ever do was talk about Atlantis. Obsessed. He was so certain that it existed. And then one day he just vanishes. No note, nothing.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he found Atlantis. Who knows? I’m sorry I can’t help. He did write a book about it, though. The Impossibility of the Real: Theorizing Atlantis. He put it on our required reading list.”
“You don’t have a copy, do you?”
“’Fraid not. They should have one at the Powell Library, though. It’s just across the quad.”
The library swarmed with students tapping away at their laptops: I only saw one, a dark-haired girl in green leggings, who was actually reading a book. Kelner’s book was very slim; more of a pamphlet, really. Underneath the title was a painting I recognised as Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego. I opened it a few pages in:
The homeless operate according to a temporal and special paradigm that constitutes a nomadic smooth-space disruption of the striations of space as interpreted by the State. They manifest themselves not as a series of molar entities but as a single substance engaged in a total deterritorialisation: their model is not that of the herd but that of the swarm.
I flipped forwards a few pages:
Here it may be valuable to consider the development of the subterranean city in terms of Negarestani’s ( )hole complex and his conceptualization of solidus and void.
Towards the end:
Hardt & Negri’s assertion that resistance is ontologically prior to power provides a reversal of traditional social dynamics that allows for a wealth of new theoretical approaches. Similarly, a richer understanding may be achieved if it is postulated that it is, in fact, Los Angeles that forms a vast parasite on Atlantis; a teeming, grossly over-extended remora-city whose inhabitants live out their lives unaware their existences form a superficial manifestation of a far more profound reality. Los Angeles, home to the entertainment industry and epicenter of global spectacularity, is constructed of artifice and simulacrum; it is only its leech-like attachment to Atlantis that prevents the entire city from drifting off into the air. It is the tellurian powers of Atlantis that maintain, direct, and control the nature of existence in the surface-city. The lack of popular recognition for the city’s dark twin and the official denials of its existence do not demonstrate that it is unreal; rather, they demonstrate that in the society of the spectacle, the Real unavoidably takes on the aspects of myth.
Before long I stopped going to work entirely. I’d spend my days in Skid Row and my nights doing feverish research in my apartment. A few of my friends still called me occasionally, but after a while they started to drift away. I scoured the Internet for maps of the tunnels under Los Angeles and started looking up prices for mead-mounted torches. I read accounts from other people who’d spent hours traipsing around the catacombs of the city trying to find Atlantis. I knew why they’d failed: they were trying to invade Atlantis, to plant their flag on its soil. To go there one had to be invited in. I thought about trying to contact Kelner – even if he’d found Atlantis maybe he still read the paper; I could place an advert in the Los Angeles Times. My trips to the laundry became sparse. I stopped shaving; I trimmed my beard occasionally, when I had the time. My jeans frayed at the cuffs. I didn’t replace them.
I was sitting on the kerbside, smoking a solitary cigarette, when I saw Molly running past me. “It’s Jerome!” she said.
I followed her. Around the corner, a moustachioed cop was wrestling for control of a shopping trolley with a wiry old man in a ragged t-shirt. Molly stopped next to them.
“Sir,” she said, panting. “What’s happening here?”
“I’d stand back if I were you, miss,” said the cop.
“What’s happening?” she said again.
The old man fixed Molly with a frenzied stare and shook his jowls, liberally dousing us in spittle. “They wan’ my treasures!” he said. “Stop ‘em, Moll! Buzzers! Bluebottles! They wanna take my treasures!”
“Let him keep them,” said Molly. “Sir, he’s not hurting anyone.”
“Your man here has a shopping cart full of bottles of his own urine,” said the cop. “It’s a public safety hazard.”
“It’s all Jerome has,” she said.
Jerome made a lunge for the cop’s waist. “Buzzers away!” he roared. The cop pushed him to the ground and cuffed him. Jerome writhed desperately. “A-da-da,” he moaned. “A-da-da-da. Not my golden. I made it myself. Stop ‘em, Moll.”
“What’s your badge number?” said Molly. “I’m going to make a complaint.”
Jerome’s head darted upwards and struck the cop on his chin. “My treasures!” he roared. The cop truncheoned him in the back of the neck. Molly rushed towards the trolley.
“Stand back!” shouted the cop. With one knee now on Jerome’s neck, he pulled a Taser from his belt. “Not one step!”
“Or what?” said Molly. “You’ll shoot me? Give him his things back!” She reached out to grab the trolley handle. The cop fired: there was a sudden crack of electricity, and two darts arced out to Molly’s chest. She fell over backwards. Her head hit the pavement with a dull thud. One arm twitched. Jerome shrieked. I rushed over to her. There was another crack. The world flashed a searing white.
“Jesus Christ,” said Molly as we walked back around the corner, defeated. “Fuck. I need a drink.”
“Shouldn’t you go to a hospital or something?”
“I’m Irish. I need a drink. I’m going back to the office. I’m going to have a drink and them I’m going to get that fucker fired. You want one?”
“It’s only five in the afternoon… what am I saying? Of course. I’d love one.”
The office was, as it turned out, two small rooms over a dollar store, half-buried in papers and ring binders. “As you can see, we’re not the most well-funded organisation out here,” said Molly, reaching into a drawer and withdrawing a bottle of whiskey. She took a big glug. “I hope you don’t mind drinking from the bottle.”
I laughed. “Reminds me of being a kid.”
Molly sat down on an overstuffed sofa leaning against one wall and beckoned me to join her. “Where do you work?” she said. “I don’t think I even asked.”
“At this accountancy firm. It’s not very interesting.”
“So what makes a guy who works at an accountancy firm suddenly decide to spend all his time on Skid Row?”
“I wasn’t always an office drone. I used to be-” I paused.
“What?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I used to write graphic novels. Unpublished, of course.”
“That’s cool. What were they about?”
“Superheroes… my thing was superheroes with boring powers. I did a whole series about a guy who had laser eyes, but they were only good for scanning barcodes at the supermarket.”
Molly laughed. “That’d go some way to explaining your obsession with Atlantis.”
“What about you? How’d you end up working here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I came down here for college, from a tiny whitebread town up in NorCal, and I was just so upset by it all… you know, two months in and I was a radical feminist and an anti-poverty campaigner and everything. I just wanted to help, I guess.” Molly stood up. “Do you like blues?” she said, walking over to a CD player in the corner of the office.
“Sure,” I said.
She pushed a button. A few dusty-sounding guitar notes sounded out. As she walked back Molly swayed her hips a little, clicking one hand, staring slightly bashfully at the floor.
“My dad only ever had one record,” she said, sitting down next to me. “He’d play it the whole time in the car. Robert Johnson. You know him?”
“Isn’t that the guy who sold his soul to the Devil?”
“At the crossroads, yeah. It’s actually all based on this Yoruba legend. It’s not necessarily the Devil. It’s Eshu. The spirit of the crossroads.”
I thought of Brandon, hearing the voices of dead gods in the ruins of Babylon. “There’s myth everywhere. Under the surface.”
Molly gave me a strange look. “You’re such a Romantic,” she said.
“Aren’t I just.” I slid an arm over her shoulders and leant towards her.
“Oh, knock it off.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t a fucking compliment! Why are you here? I’ve seen you. All you talk to the guys is about is Atlantis. This tooth fairy legend! Like they don’t matter. There are real people suffering out there, and you come down here because – because what? You find it interesting? You get some sick aesthetic enjoyment out of their misery?”
“That’s not true,” I said, not fully believing myself.
“Yes it is! You don’t really care, do you? You’re interested, but you don’t care.”
“You’re drunk.”
“It’s still true. You don’t give a shit about anyone apart from yourself.”
I stared at the floor. “I don’t know how to.”
Molly stood up. “Please go,” she said. “I’d feel a lot better if you- please, just go.”
I didn’t go back to Skid Row the next day. I sat around listlessly in my apartment, watching TV, trying not to think about Atlantis. That afternoon I had a less than friendly visit from two officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They explained as I packed my possessions that, as I hadn’t shown up for work in weeks, my visa was no longer valid. On the flight back, I stared out the window as the desert melted into the vast flat cornfields of the Midwest, as the Appalachians soared past me, as the interminable expanse of the Atlantic was finally broken by a rolling patchwork of tiny constricted fields. I was home, back in that crowded little space where all the ancient myths died out centuries ago.
I manage. Friends and family were surprised to see me back so early; when I tried to explain what had happened I could tell that they didn’t really understand. I have a job, and my old apartment again. I’ve given up drawing altogether, which is probably for the best. Most of the time I don’t even think about it. But whenever in one of those moments of blankness my mind floats away from its surroundings – when I’m in the shower, or on public transport, or bored at the office – it always goes to the same place. I float through the miles of empty tunnels under Los Angeles, chasing the faint gleam of a light that is always close but never within reach, searching for Atlantis.
[account deactivated]
crustpunk_trotsky
crustpunk_trotsky
Post rating:
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awful
[account deactivated]
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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Hey Ken i was going to say the other day you should write about your experiences and perceptions of La-La-land rather than just like period blood stains and you did, good work.
I liked your descriptions but still think you could improve them to try and capture that weird plastic ethereal twilight that is southern California, “postapocalyptic” comes across like a bit of a stock phrase.
Cool though
I liked your descriptions but still think you could improve them to try and capture that weird plastic ethereal twilight that is southern California, “postapocalyptic” comes across like a bit of a stock phrase.
Cool though
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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tpaine posted:
didnt read a word
good decision
jools
jools
Post rating:
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iwc here's an avatar for you
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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I watched some of that when I was in England, you guys have done a really good job at undermining your purse-lipped Victorian morality with the American vulgarity of airing dirty laundry in public.
Scrree
Scrree
Post rating:
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I read every word.
Scrree
Scrree
Post rating:
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i got the Bertrand/Lykourgos connection but missed the others; in your suicide note will you explicitly explain all your character references for dullards like me? thanks.
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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you really go and check out skid row ken?
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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i got the Bertrand/Lykourgos connection but missed the others; in your suicide note will you explicitly explain all your character references for dullards like me? thanks.
haha i was actually thinkin of grumblefish when i wrote that but i tend to not actually base most of my characters on forum posters, unlike my fellow writer john 'john christy' christ johnny
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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you really go and check out skid row ken?
yeah. i didnt talk to anyone there though... im literally more cowardly than a cowardly character i created. still not been to south central yet but i really wanna go
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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actually thats not true we did get briefly lost in south central on our way to usc, at night lol
cleanhands
cleanhands
Post rating:
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yo deadken just an fyi but 'big' isnt a very interesting or informative adjective to apply to a minivan, and this ruined the entire essay for me. please try harder in future, thanks
AmericanNazbro
AmericanNazbro
Post rating:
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ken i liked your atlantis writing. it was good despite how bad it was.
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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the world is a vampire.
crustpunk_trotsky
crustpunk_trotsky
Post rating:
+
why do all white men in extended adolescence write all of their characters with the same voice. or do they actually assume the whole world talks like them
jools
jools
Post rating:
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ken and impper are white?!
crustpunk_trotsky
crustpunk_trotsky
Post rating:
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gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
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i skimmed quickly but didnt see any sex or rape. is this supposed to be hardprose?
animedad
animedad
Post rating:
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the cool thing is that it reads like a movie script a little bit and this goes along w/ the theme. fwiw i think the voice at the start is good, maybe do a little more storytelling and less dialogue?
littlegreenpills
littlegreenpills
Poronto
Post rating:
+
It was just gone 11. A little moisture from the shower clinging to the tips of his ears, he tipped his head back and drained his mug. A thin line of salty bitterness bloomed right at the back of his tongue, as the soapy coffee washed over it and Mandarin And Pineapple scent bouqueted into his nose. He grimaced. Always rinse twice. Always.
He glanced reflexively at the cat, snoring on the sofa next to him. The cat was a surrogate of his girlfriend, asleep in the other room. Not a conscious thought in a conscious brain anywhere in the apartment, except for his own. He got up, drifted in front of the mirror, and began to adjust his hair. Then he unbuttoned his shirt as far down as it would go, making sure as much of his chest hair as possible was visible. Finally, he rolled up the sock he had set aside earlier, moulded it into a vague ellipsoid, and stuffed it into his underpants. He critically surveyed the resulting bulge, and took a minute to sculpt it into a slightly more natural form. All of this was accomplished without a hint of embarrassment.The plan was still nice and abstract as a notion in his midbrain, and bore no more relation to its real and impending execution than the printed label on a Cup Ramen bears to the flavor of its contents.
Tiptoeing into the bedroom to get his jeans, he caught sight of her. A single ray of sunlight hung slicing through the room from the gap in the curtains, setting dust motes ablaze on its way and ending in a broad glowing line across a pale cheek. One stray lock shone like obsidian, and the lips were far redder than he remembered them ever being. The swelling bosom half hidden under the covers would rise, and fall, and rise with perfect rhythm until the sun was low in the sky; he had plenty of time before the impossibly red lips would part and some bland, barely formed words of gratitude for the coffee and the cake would come out. He held onto the tender anticipation of her eyes flickering open, and tried very, very hard not to imagine what today’s fight would be about. Well, no - even though what it might start with was always a mystery and fertile ground for absorbing speculation, it would undoubtedly be about the exact same things as the last one; everything, and nothing, running the full Shakespearian gamut of emotion. Was she dreading waking up as well? He tore his gaze from her and left the room.
The elevator's doors were chrome, polished to a reflective shine; his image gazed approvingly back at him. He recalled a roommate of his in college, who when he thought he was alone would stand in front of the mirror in this exact attitude and tell himself "You *rock*" and other silly lines of positive self-talk. Ho, ho, ho; who had the last laugh now? The doors opened one floor down, and a strange woman walked in, bound lobbyward - he carefully kept his face impassive, carefully noted the movement of her eyes. Ah, there it was! A glance, brief but telling, at his stuffed, bulging crotch! Her sordid thoughts were exposed, and by extension the potentially sordid thoughts of the world of women, the world he was aiming for. Thus he found excuse enough to quiet the mocking, doubting inner voice that had constantly threatened to ruin the morning's careful preparations. His heart began to beat faster.
The bookstore was the hunting ground he had chosen, mainly but not merely for reasons of convenience and familiarity. There were rather fewer books in it these days; space had to be given over to accessories, attractive commercial displays, and deep plush sofas that threatened to devour the reader that sank into them. A large coffee shop sprawled over one corner of the building. The gross, antique notion of cramming the largest possible selection of books into the smallest possible space had made for an ugly game which internet retailers had mercifully ended, leaving their comelier sisters with the happy priority of perfecting their aesthetics. The casual romance of browsing the bookstore, where the books had become almost incidental. And romance hung unspoken in the charged air, as he watched females of every stripe and hue sail past like aquarium fish. There were the young and the somewhat less young.There were the naturally lovely, and their worthy rivals the crassly, flagrantly, artificially lovely, and then there were those theoretically unremarkable women who, though blessed with neither craft nor natural endowment, nevertheless achieved through preternal and graceful control of facial expression and manner a beauty of equal measure.
Though he was vaguely aware it existed, he wasn't sure himself where the sharp cutoff lay - the one beyond which he would mentally endow a woman as a mere human presence shuffling across his awareness, as inconsequentially as a man. He sometimes allowed himself a moment's guilty suspicion that it was an intersection of physical criteria, definite yet indefinable - lips that sagged *just* so much, hair that was *just* so faded, thighs and cheeks that spread a bit too broadly. He would never paint himself a misogynist, but some women were regrettably more equal than others.
He glanced reflexively at the cat, snoring on the sofa next to him. The cat was a surrogate of his girlfriend, asleep in the other room. Not a conscious thought in a conscious brain anywhere in the apartment, except for his own. He got up, drifted in front of the mirror, and began to adjust his hair. Then he unbuttoned his shirt as far down as it would go, making sure as much of his chest hair as possible was visible. Finally, he rolled up the sock he had set aside earlier, moulded it into a vague ellipsoid, and stuffed it into his underpants. He critically surveyed the resulting bulge, and took a minute to sculpt it into a slightly more natural form. All of this was accomplished without a hint of embarrassment.The plan was still nice and abstract as a notion in his midbrain, and bore no more relation to its real and impending execution than the printed label on a Cup Ramen bears to the flavor of its contents.
Tiptoeing into the bedroom to get his jeans, he caught sight of her. A single ray of sunlight hung slicing through the room from the gap in the curtains, setting dust motes ablaze on its way and ending in a broad glowing line across a pale cheek. One stray lock shone like obsidian, and the lips were far redder than he remembered them ever being. The swelling bosom half hidden under the covers would rise, and fall, and rise with perfect rhythm until the sun was low in the sky; he had plenty of time before the impossibly red lips would part and some bland, barely formed words of gratitude for the coffee and the cake would come out. He held onto the tender anticipation of her eyes flickering open, and tried very, very hard not to imagine what today’s fight would be about. Well, no - even though what it might start with was always a mystery and fertile ground for absorbing speculation, it would undoubtedly be about the exact same things as the last one; everything, and nothing, running the full Shakespearian gamut of emotion. Was she dreading waking up as well? He tore his gaze from her and left the room.
The elevator's doors were chrome, polished to a reflective shine; his image gazed approvingly back at him. He recalled a roommate of his in college, who when he thought he was alone would stand in front of the mirror in this exact attitude and tell himself "You *rock*" and other silly lines of positive self-talk. Ho, ho, ho; who had the last laugh now? The doors opened one floor down, and a strange woman walked in, bound lobbyward - he carefully kept his face impassive, carefully noted the movement of her eyes. Ah, there it was! A glance, brief but telling, at his stuffed, bulging crotch! Her sordid thoughts were exposed, and by extension the potentially sordid thoughts of the world of women, the world he was aiming for. Thus he found excuse enough to quiet the mocking, doubting inner voice that had constantly threatened to ruin the morning's careful preparations. His heart began to beat faster.
The bookstore was the hunting ground he had chosen, mainly but not merely for reasons of convenience and familiarity. There were rather fewer books in it these days; space had to be given over to accessories, attractive commercial displays, and deep plush sofas that threatened to devour the reader that sank into them. A large coffee shop sprawled over one corner of the building. The gross, antique notion of cramming the largest possible selection of books into the smallest possible space had made for an ugly game which internet retailers had mercifully ended, leaving their comelier sisters with the happy priority of perfecting their aesthetics. The casual romance of browsing the bookstore, where the books had become almost incidental. And romance hung unspoken in the charged air, as he watched females of every stripe and hue sail past like aquarium fish. There were the young and the somewhat less young.There were the naturally lovely, and their worthy rivals the crassly, flagrantly, artificially lovely, and then there were those theoretically unremarkable women who, though blessed with neither craft nor natural endowment, nevertheless achieved through preternal and graceful control of facial expression and manner a beauty of equal measure.
Though he was vaguely aware it existed, he wasn't sure himself where the sharp cutoff lay - the one beyond which he would mentally endow a woman as a mere human presence shuffling across his awareness, as inconsequentially as a man. He sometimes allowed himself a moment's guilty suspicion that it was an intersection of physical criteria, definite yet indefinable - lips that sagged *just* so much, hair that was *just* so faded, thighs and cheeks that spread a bit too broadly. He would never paint himself a misogynist, but some women were regrettably more equal than others.
cleanhands
cleanhands
Post rating:
~
i read as far as he grimaced and didnt want to read more sorry
(crit is easy and writing is hard, and i hate challenging myself, sorry)
(crit is easy and writing is hard, and i hate challenging myself, sorry)
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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why do all white men in extended adolescence write all of their characters with the same voice. or do they actually assume the whole world talks like them
uh half the characters in that thing quite clearly talk in a shitty imitation of aave???? whats ur Deal "crustpunk_trotsky".
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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Ho, ho, ho; who had the last laugh now?
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
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das kewl lgp.... ur prose does tend towards the hyperbolic a lil sometimes, like if thats intentional maybe accentuate it a lil.... and when u do use vernacularisms like the ho ho ho bit or the reference to cup ramen it feels kinda jarring + bathetic....
deadken
deadken
penitent
Post rating:
~
A single ray of sunlight hung slicing through the room from the gap in the curtains, setting dust motes ablaze on its way and ending in a broad glowing line across a pale cheek.
mo' a dis
Ah, there it was! A glance, brief but telling, at his stuffed, bulging crotch! Her sordid thoughts were exposed, and by extension the potentially sordid thoughts of the world of women, the world he was aiming for.
less a dis
mo' a dis
Ah, there it was! A glance, brief but telling, at his stuffed, bulging crotch! Her sordid thoughts were exposed, and by extension the potentially sordid thoughts of the world of women, the world he was aiming for.
less a dis