Apophany is a new culture column from Christopher Sloce, author of Kentucky Meat Shower. It will be coming out more regularly than Kentucky Meat Shower.
It’s been awhile, but you don’t really stop working after a point. And not everything deserves an entire zine written about it (reminder that Kentucky Meat Shower is a zine). Thus, I’ve decided to make good on the threat inherent in my being and write a column. I will neither limit or label its focus other than to say politics will be discussed because you almost have to if you’re writing a true culture column but not in the dead end of imperial soap operas or stultified Jacobin “socialism is when we get a better chicken sandwich” nonsense.
Culture as defined as cooking, music, television if it warrants it, film, novels, short stories, plays, parks, gardens, restaurants, comic books, photography, paintings, sculpture, sport, games, history, auto-mobiles, shopping centers, Playmobil pirates, Kewpie Dolls, sea monkeys. An invisible ocean of notions, symbols and practices as it pertains to now. An apophany is a singular instance of stumbling onto one of these meaningless connections between interconnected things, as opposed to an epiphany, where the connection is meaningful. Gamblers suffer from apophanies, as do people who have recently encountered the Baader-Meinhof group , blue cars, or plates of shrimp. The idea is to call the column this in order to avoid the condition. It’s as good of a column name as any.
The reason for this is that I see a very deep connection between criticism and creating art. If I have some sort of aesthetic notion of how I want my writing to be, that is mostly built on understanding of the works I’ve already read, keeping and disposing as I see fit. That requires some critical capacity, and I think my work will only benefit from sharpening my critical instincts. I see the two houses of prose formulating a duplex.
The goal, more or less: get two of these out a month. It’s very proudly a column. When I was younger, I looked at the bridge column in The Coalfield Progress with a rapt attention to its occultations. The immensity of this cryptic language that reads like gambling patter and thieves cant for church elders has loomed large in my imagination. If you don’t know what I’m talking about in a column, I invite you to have the same approach. The hope is I make work that stands in the middle and attempts to make sense of the unsensible. I’ll see you in about a week or so, and then in April we’ll be on a more regular schedule.
While I have your attention: my short story “Granma’s Dumbwaiter” was accepted by Cobblestones, an online literary magazine hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Creative Writing MFA program. This is my first fiction credit in nine years, and hopefully not my last.
If you’ve read my writing you can probably guess that I am a big fan of weird fiction, both iterative weird fiction and fiction that is so of its own logic and goals it acts like a pressure cooker with a Casio attached to it. My fiction “break” was as much an intense period of locating myself as it was failure to publish anything. (I chased writing jobs for too long, that’s for fucking sure). Probably the most intense study I did was a deep stream of gothic fiction, attempting to write stories that echo my favorites and a few other choice spices in there. The result of all that study is finally publishing a story I’m very proud of, because now I have a short story I can point to and say, without question, “This is me and what I want to do.” It’s no accident, then, that it also slots itself easily into weird fiction. Disruption and destablization are goals of fiction I want to write, whatever genre signifiers may be attached. My critical work is to make sense then of either what’s to be disrupted or what has been.