Introduction to Dear Navigator (1:3) double issue: The Crush
If someone is making you feel this way, you might wonder what is going on—
Elliot works in the advertising business with Michael, who is married to Hope. Hope is a writer who stays at home with her children, Janey and Leo, and struggles with her feelings for environmentalist John. Melissa is Michael’s cousin; she used to date Gary and once shot a Carly Simon album cover. Elliot, not Ellyn (Ellyn is Hope’s childhood friend)—remember Elliot? He’s married to Nancy, who’s kind of like Hope, but possibly less earnest and well, she survives ovarian cancer and it’s moving (like emotion, an Eadweard Muybridge animation). Gary. . . . Sigh, Gary. Gary is Michael’s college roommate whom everyone adores, who marries Susannah (whom everyone finds palpably distasteful) and has baby Emma and then, well, then Gary dies. Susannah moves away.
That old ragtime piano—
Crush, Texas, was established for a single day. William George Crush, general passenger agent of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, conceived a gratis spectacle: stage a fake train wreck and the people will come. Survive the negative publicity and you will be rehired the following day. Scott Joplin will commemorate your piece with piano accompaniment.
T. Moffett, Silkewormes (63). The hart-breake chrush of melancholies wheele.
Elliott and Hope and Melissa and Gary—well, Gary’s dead—and baby Emma live in Philadelphia, that city of brotherly love, the crush. How will they bear the weight of it?
Acrimonious compression or pressure that bruises, breaks down, injures, or destroys. The Violent Bear It Away. A funnel-shaped fenced passage; a group or gang—remember Elliot? [crush-belt, crush-breccia, crush-conglomerate, crush-line, crush-material, crush-movement, crush-plane, crush-rock, crush-structure, crush-zone] The resulting code tells the story in detail in Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between.
Susan Daitch delivers a cinematic erasure of monstrous cutscenes: sent to advance the plot, a hybrid crash. William George Crush is waiting in vain. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”—Flannery O’Connor. William Fuller’s Zombieland will sneak you out the backdoor. Eric Baus clones clouds (another monstrum?) pulling wool over the sky, like in winter, where it is best to press things together, carve out a small space.
J. Addison, Cato (v. i.). Unhurt amidst the war of elements, (T)he wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.
Ellyn tells Hope not to watch Michael sulk. Scott Joplin died of dementia in 1917 after a bout with tertiary syphilis provoked his descent into madness and terminal stay at the Manhattan State Hospital. The Maple Leaf Rag. Eleni Sikelianos carves a portfolio pressed between the ribs. Zachary Schomburg is in seria: Viking’s recorder crushes time, multiplies selves like fifths by sixths.
The railroad tie transfers the load to the ballast. “This song is a worthy first effort.” Ellyn has an affair with Jeffrey, a married man. Remember Elliott? Kate Zambreno hoards her scraps like the Sybil. Pressure enlarges. Kristi Maxwell swells Robert Louis Stevenson. Hamdy el-Gazzar smarts at the heaviness of a hand on his shoulder; sublingual now (remember Elliott?), under the tongue.
W. Scoresby, Acct. Artic Regions (I. 214). The ice pressed dreadfully around them. . . . But the ship always escaped the heaviest crushes.
Susannah moves away. Both boilers exploded in “The Crush Collision March.” Scott Joplin was buried in a pauper’s grave. An infatuation, to be enamored of, to take a strong fancy. Remember Elliott? Echoing back, always.
**
Kristi McGuire & Elizabeth Metzger Sampson
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Editor: Elizabeth Metzger Sampson
Curator and Content Editor: Kristi McGuire
Editor-at-Large: Chris Cuellar
Associate Editors: Rebecca Elliott, Heather McShane, Edmund Sandoval, Colin Winnette
Spiritual Advisor: Sarah Archer
Chicago, Winter 2010-11
