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By Seph Murtagh.
It’s Christmas Day and they are gathered in the living room when Brother #3 asks what is that plant, the plant on the table, the plant with the brown leaves; and Tired Father says those leaves aren’t brown, they’re red, that’s a poinsettia, can you see the red asks Tired Father, turning to Brother #1; and Brother #1 says he can see that one part of the poinsettia is darker than the other, but looking at the leaves he can’t tell which part of the poinsettia is red, maybe it’s just a trick of the light; and Brother #2 says he thinks the darker leaves near the top of the poinsettia might be red even though honestly they look kind of brown to him; and Brother #3 says it’s easier to identify colors when he’s looking at things he already knows, like the stocking by the fireplace, he knows that’s red, or the blanket on the lap of the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer, which has a red-and-black checkered pattern that is familiar to him even though he doesn’t know what to call it, it’s a kind of fall pattern, at any rate he knows that’s red, whereas with poinsettias, he’s really not familiar with them and he doesn’t know what color they’re supposed to be; which raises an interesting point says Brother #1, it’s not like he goes through life constantly asking himself is this green, is this red, is this orange, but then he’ll be in a situation where he’ll get a color wrong and people will learn he’s colorblind and they’ll start doing the thing where they point to random objects and ask what color is this, what color is this, and then all of a sudden he feels this terrible insecurity about colors, it’s not the colors themselves he hates, it’s the social pressure to classify them; although how often is it really a problem asks Brother #3, he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a disability, more like an occasional inconvenience; he’s not sure says Brother #2, it’s kind of a pain for him at work, the landscapers he sells to are finicky about their designs and he can’t tell the difference between purple and blue flowers; for hunting too it’s a problem says Brother #1, he can’t follow a blood trail to save his life; better make sure you have a good shot then says Brother #2; his problem is pink and gray says Brother #3; that’s a weird one says Brother #2; yes says the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer, the first sign of a problem was when Brother #3 colored the walls of a castle in his coloring book pink, there was also the time Brother #1 claimed his teacher at school had green hair, do you remember that she says to Tired Father; but Tired Father has fallen asleep on the couch; someone nudge him please she says; deuteranopia that’s what it’s called says Brother #3; is what what’s called asks Brother #2; is what pink-grey colorblindness is called says Brother #3, he just googled it; whereupon Brother #2 asks is that different from the red-green kind because for him the grass is orange especially after it’s raining and the sunlight is shining on it; for him, too, the grass is orange says Brother #1, kind of rough playing soccer as a kid and he couldn’t see the orange sidelines and the whole team would be shouting at him while he tried to do a throw-in; what are the odds of all three of you says Tired Father (having been nudged awake now by Brother #2) they’ve got to be one in a million, maybe one in a billion; they say it’s a sign of intelligence says the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer; maybe there is an evolutionary advantage to it says Brother #3, like isn’t that how evolution works, a mutation that turns into an advantage; hard to see what the advantage of colorblindness would be says Brother #2; best of all as a kid were the tests where he could see things the other kids couldn’t see says Brother #1, like a little figure eight would show up in the circle of dots and only he could see it; although those tests were the first time he knew something was wrong with him says Brother #2, before then he just saw colors and nobody asked for their names and the world was fine; and hearing this, Brother #1 looks at the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer with her hair in the braids that the hospital has done up, and she’s holding a little plastic sippy cup that she’s drinking out of with a yellow straw, and in the low flickering light of the living room it gives her a childish appearance, and instantly his mind is rocketed back to his first memory of her, he was two, feeding the squirrels through the kitchen window of a rented bungalow in Vermont, and his mother’s hands were pressed against his shoulders to keep him from toppling backwards into the sink, and there were no names for things, no words even, just movements and sounds and flashes of light and bright colors, the small furry creatures poking their snouts through the window and sniffing at the breadcrumbs in his hands, and his mother pressing him forward, gently; this is the morning he remembers, suddenly, right then, looking at her, and even though all present circumstances would seem to deny it; even though the cancer has rampaged so thoroughly through her body that her time on earth is reckoned in weeks; even though his mind is stunned by the chilling presentiment that someday it will happen to him too, this decrepitude, this slide into darkness; even despite the ammonia in her liver and the failed chemotherapy treatments and the paralyzed limb that has immobilized her in a wheelchair; even despite the Sara Stedy sit-to-stand lift that took him and his father four hours to assemble, his father barking instructions at him the entire time, the Sara Stedy half-assembled on the floor beneath them and the sight of his father yelling and waving the instruction booklet in the air reminding him of how it was when he was a kid and he would help his father install drywall or rake leaves or stack firewood, and suddenly he has a premonition of how it will be when his mother is gone, the irony of striving his entire life to escape this figure who is standing beside him shouting that’s the wrong-sized screw, but it won’t matter, as soon as his mother is dead he will come crashing back into his father’s orbit, so that when he finally does locate the correct screw and tighten it into the Sara Stedy what he feels is not pleasure at completing the task but a sense that the screw is a metaphor for a metaphysical tightening that is binding him to his father forever; even despite the word commode his father keeps saying, as in, his mother needs her commode, it’s time for her to use her commode, so that finally, thinking his father is squeamish and using an archaic word as a euphemism, he bursts out laughing and asks him why he keeps saying that, and his father replies because that’s what it’s fucking called, and he googles it only to discover that, yes, that’s what it’s called; even though he knows it’s coming any day now, the moment when his phone will ring and he will answer and his father will break the news in a voice grown thin and tinny and high like he has sucked the helium out of a balloon, and not knowing what to say to his father, he’ll mutter sorry into the phone, stupidly, as if it’s a distant relative who has just died and not his own mother; even now at this late hour it does not seem impossible to him that he’ll be with her there again, in that morning of bright colors that have no names.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seph Murtagh is a writer living in Ithaca, New York. His essays have appeared in Socrates on the Beach, the Missouri Review, and the Mid-American Review. You can find him on Twitter @sephmurtagh.
Daniel Davis Wood interviews Dominic Jaeckle.
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM, published by Tenement Press, is a novella equal parts gnomic, unsettling, and bitterly funny. Set in the apparently early days of post-apocalyptic civilisation—a civilisation that uncertainly apes a fragmented concept of what “civilisation” entails—MUEUM explores the ins and outs of a museum that acts as a repository for the ephemera of a long-lost way of life. With MUEUM currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Tenement Press editor Dominic Jaeckle spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the origins of MUEUM and its reception.
3:AM: Look at the opening lines of MUEUM and it seems like something familiar enough, with its gestures towards a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But very quickly it turns into something less familiar, more difficult to pin down: abstract, often theoretical, an intellectual exercise, but not a cold one—an exercise in morbid self-deprecation and deadpan humour, as much as anything else. How did you encounter MUEUM as something you felt compelled to publish?
DJ: From the editorship of Hotel on through to the advent of Tenement’s activities back in 2021, I was drawn to the spike of SJ Fowler’s anarchic wit, and I’ve been fortunate enough to count on Fowler as a friend and frequent collaborator. With either the page or stage in mind, our collaborations have always leaned on conversation, and the candour of our exchanges always proved coloured by a free circulation of ideas. Be it a consideration of creativity, fresh enthusiasms, works-in-progress, or projects-in-percolation—all was ever fair game—and (in the best sense of the word) it seemed inevitable that, once the Press had found its feet, we’d begin thinking on the prospect of our working on a publication together.
The idea of publishing MUEUM emerged organically from the critical palette of such a kinship, from such a free market of mind. Fowler sent on MUEUM as a fully formed manuscript, and I was struck by the ways in which his first draft compounded an array of entrapments via his acute, curt prose. In MUEUM, we’ve the biographical; the bibliographical; the philosophical; the personal; the institutional; the intellectual; and a dedication to the psychic ironies and chemical truths that compete for attention in any circumnavigation of the notion of hourly pay. Of the value of time. All heady nodes in a constellation of concerns that butt heads over a short distance, like livestock suddenly all too aware of the farm’s fence line, in sum—and as a manuscript—MUEUM seemed to write itself down as a prism of prisons.
3:AM: So what was it about the book that hooked you and convinced you to take it on?
DJ: As a debut novella that owed to a writer of more renown as a champion of free association and spontaneity (by way of his dedication to the works of poets such as Tom Raworth and David Antin), my first reading felt akin to sitting with a bird whom seeks to speak to (and scrutinise) its own clipped wings. The manuscript felt like an experiment in articulating an idea in a continually narrowing space, and its reflexive response to the circumstances of such a claustrophobia (one part slapstick; two parts tragedy) gifted the novella a distinct magnetism. Following Steve’s first email, I read his pages in a sitting, and the book would publish a year later.
Formally, such an atmosphere is key to Tenement’s list more broadly. Tenement aims to platform works in which authors, poets and translators challenge the limited space afforded a page via a testing of the curbs of convention and, in biographical terms, MUEUM is also a fascinating rejoinder to Fowler’s own practice. Fowler has ever worked to establish his own defiantly independent context for his work (and a showcase of the works of others); his is a generous, assertively strange and ever-enthusiastic field of enquiry; but there’s always a simmering cynicism at the core of his writing.
In my first encounter with MUEUM, I was reminded of a line from his 2017 collection, The Wrestlers: ‘Diogenes the Cynic said nothing upon hearing Zeno’s arguments, but stood up and walked in order to demonstrate the falsity of Zeno’s conclusions.’ That “standing and walking” work as quite a beautiful means of thinking through the varied emphases of Fowler’s playful and prolific productivity as a poet is true, to my mind. However, MUEUM represented a study of the ways in which certain things inhibit our gait, our capacity for independent thought, our ability to freewheel through the corridors and wings of such an imagined glasshouse as Fowler’s “museum.” Rather than an imago of any free agent aiming defiantly to walk on, their strident sense of self intact, MUEUM—with Buster Keaton’s acuity and a brand of Bernhardian savagery—musters a picture of the ways in which the world (or a city, and its various ecosystems) interrupts any capacity to stride on freely. It’s a banana peel of a novella, and it’s that precise quality of Steve’s writing which first drew me to the project.
3:AM: You mention the idea of MUEUM developing from your kinship with Fowler, but how did that kinship play out editorially in the development of the book? I mean, thinking on the book that was published a year after you received the first draft, did your collaborative discussions go beyond the idea to shape that draft into its final form?
DJ: The novella was near finished by the time it reached me; the fact of MUEUM very much preceded the idea of it as book, in this instance. Fowler shared the manuscript without much of any spiritual sculpture, per any sense of the writing’s more theoretical angles, nor did he elaborate at all on the political indications of its implications. We spoke a little to the bibliographic precedent to his putting pen to paper, but—in the main—such conversations centred on a reminiscence of using and abusing a university library’s facilities, and photocopying major and minor works of fiction in full (to then stroll away with the works of the Nestbeschmutzer rolled up in the back pocket like the daily news, treating a history of European literature like a cryptic crossword to be ritually abused with morning coffee).
Writing in the margins of the works of such authors as Witold Gombrowicz and Elias Canetti seems to have been key to MUEUM’s development. The Kafkaesque kicking “K” of Fowler’s work is a character called Greg—a human subjected to the demands of the museum’s stewardship—and it felt imperative that the sensation of subjection as the book would carry should never feel as though it was set in place in order to solve anything. The book is an apposite objection to the very idea of a Roman à Clef (the museum’s doors are open to the public on a daily basis; if they’re locked, they’re locked, and it’s the staff’s doing), and it felt imperative to allow for the novella’s architecture to build itself on a policy of plain speech. A dedication to the simple presentation of matter, of happening, and to sound out the burr of an all-too-human presence in the institutional sphere.
Descriptions of paintings; of trees; of hallways; signage; the colour of over-steeped tea; noises and visions… “The museum is a shop for all that,” as Fowler puts it in MUEUM, and he’d tooled and tilled the text again and again to strip the meat and muscle from sentences, levelling the language to a kind of line of sight, which’d prove handsomely to justify the book’s relationship with abstraction. Follow the metaphors to their logical conclusion, and—in end—things could simply sit there as things. This would qualify both people and artefacts as elements of the museum’s strange architecture—diminishing all symbolic hierarchies so as a fire extinguisher proves as triumphal a metonym for a history of human civilisation as a Horus statuette.
Indeed, there’s a quiet argumentative line throughout the novella per a need to disquiet a want to wash an idea in too much philosophy (knowing full well that philosophy would seep into the seams of the book irrespective of such), and our editorial collaboration necessarily proved a paean to the exercise of exorcising complexity. We’d worked to engine along on a policy of trial and error. Courting ways and means of framing, sometimes fragmenting, and then reforging the prose, Fowler worked in isolation in an enormously concentrated fashion. Letting the book percolate—rewild itself—to then boil the writing down, down, to its bare bones. This would resolve in the more skeletal prose as has landed on the page, and allowed for us to toy carefully with sentence, space, and paragraph as we’d worked our way through to print.
3:AM: I’m curious about how readers of MUEUM have responded to it, as far as you’ve been able to tell. I imagine that some readers would be familiar with SJ Fowler’s work, and others might’ve come to it via an affinity for Tenement—but Fowler is a poet, and Tenement has published poetry up to now, so how has it been received as both the author’s and the press’ first foray into prose?
DJ: Responses to the novella have been gloriously diverse. Some have pointed to its innate calamity; its relationship with catastrophe; its scrutiny of work and precarity. Others have indicated its comedy as key, or spoken to its metatextual referentiality as fundamental (the Los Angeles Review of Books argued the novella is in direct correspondence with a “minatory canon,” vis-à-vis Ballard, Céline, and others). But the lens I’ve accidentally inherited owes to a long dialogue between Fowler and Gareth Evans we’d recorded in Resonance FM’s Bermondsey studios last Spring. Evans numbers the idea (and question) of “collective purpose” as at the heart of the novella. Opining the book as a “novel-come-manifesto” that queries all aspects of the museum, he’d argued MUEUM sits ever-interrogatively as “a radical prose intervention” into the very meaning of the word “museum.” What it stands for; what it means in civilisational terms; per its labour and stewardship… Why we forge museums in the present, as things around us so rapidly decay and shape-shift (and in light of the “staggering uncertainty” of the present), seems be a keystone to the book that conversations have gravitated around.
Readers I’ve had a chance to speak to have broadly responded well to the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella, but also to its want to raise questions rather than solve any particular thesis, table any particular theory, qualify any specific political direction. In MUEUM, we’ve an automobile that refuses to elect its lane, and that not only feels fundamental to the conversations I’ve had with readers and collaborators since the book’s publication, but also appeals to the curious place of the novel as an inquisitive tool in our present moment. MUEUM frames itself as in a satirical confrontation with historic matter—with the ways in which objects forge a false narratological glue for our comprehension of the present—and quietly prefigures the form of the novel itself as though a rare, disintegrating museum. A structure capable of celebrating its own misdirection, misgivings, and creative lineage. The work’s confusion is germinal, and that’s funny, in its way—or allows comedy to stew on the hob behind the scenes, page for page—but also seems to be the beating heart of Fowler’s project, the centre of its melancholy, and the thump of that particular brand of pulmonary percussion has been brilliant to privy to.
At a late launch for the novella last Autumn, Chloe Aridjis read from her own diamond-like novel Asunder (itself an incendiary portrayal of a museum’s staff), and she’d cited Jean Clair’s Malaise dans les musées (by way of Adorno’s pun on the link between a “museum” and a “mausoleum”) so as to home in on Clair’s signalling of the museum as an indicator of our shared desire for stasis and stillness; of a natural want to hold something steadily enough for proper observation. The problem, as Aridjis quite strikingly put it, is that every surface gives way to pressure eventually, to a kind of physical or critical craquelure. MUEUM deliberately sets out to amplify the crackle of antiqued paint, and speak through the noise to our tacit acceptance of often inhuman conditions in its consideration of the composition of culture, and the kind of labour called upon to safeguard a consensus around what any history of a culture looks like. This penetrates the novella’s relationship with language, with violence, with comedy, and—ultimately—expresses itself as a kind of a carnival of boredom (and cold portrait of its effects).
That a book sits still until you break its spine seems be Fowler’s coy smile or wry joke, and seems also to have chimed with the readers with whom I’ve been lucky enough to discuss the book. As a “first foray into prose” for Tenement, such ideas proved intriguing from the starting gate.
3:AM: It’s quite striking to see your description of “the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella.” That doubt — that generative restlessness and refusal of resolution — is I think what I also responded to most strongly as a reader. How important do you think that sort of quality is to winning your enthusiasm when you’re looking at what to publish? I suppose I could almost see a commitment to a sort of creative uncertainty as an essential part of what you’re hoping to publish with Tenement, though I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Perhaps it’s easier to ask the inverse: are you likely to muster similar enthusiasm for prose that turns towards more traditional ends, with narrative setups, incidents, and resolutions?
DJ: A grounding thought for the architectonics of Tenement’s doings owes a great deal to critic Manny Farber, and his sense of a ‘termite art’ as in counterpoint to the work of the ‘white elephants’ of the twentieth century. Progenitors of humidor-like projects that showcase a ‘drive to break out of tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.’ Siding his ‘termite’ with the ‘tapeworm’— with ‘moss’ and with ‘fungus’—Farber alludes to a kind of creativity that ‘goes always forward eating its own boundaries, […] termite-like, it feels its way through the walls of particularisation’ to eat away ‘the immediate boundaries of [an] art, and [turn] these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement.’
Resolution, as such, is not the enemy. If you write the story of a housefire, for example, that the building burns down is not a keystone to the telling, but is obviously intrinsic to the work. Likewise, Farber doesn’t flag convention nor the traditional ends-and-means of a story as any indicator that there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room (he cites John Wayne’s ‘bitter-amused’ performance in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance as emblematic of such a train of thought for its ‘intramural’ qualities). I feel Farber’s distinction and celebration of the ‘termite’ is key to literature’s part in our present moment, in attendant conversations that concern the place of the page in discussions of our political and philosophical present… “Creative uncertainty,” as you beautifully put it, is definitely a characteristic I’d always seek out as a reader, but largely as a means of ascertaining the porousness of a boundary or borderline (be it in formal, disciplinary, aesthetic terms, or otherwise). The “termite” helps frame the integrity and authenticity of an experiment, to my mind—rather than simply a want to flesh out its more chaotic characteristics—and it’s the termite’s aura we aim to better articulate via Tenement’s output.
3:AM: I mentioned above that MUEUM is the first prose title to be published by Tenement, but since then you’ve published a couple of collections of short prose and you’ve got a novella coming out later this year. What’s the appeal of the movement towards prose for you, and how do you see prose and poetry co-existing at Tenement into the future?
DJ: MUEUM may be our first prose title, strictly speaking, but Tenement endeavours to evade organising itself in terms of such formal distinctions. Enthusiasm underwrites the Press, and the aim withstands that we seek champion a kind of internationalist experiment that concentrates on the cohesiveness of a work rather than its categorisation as one thing or another. This is as true of Fowler’s work as it is of Brossa’s El saltamartí / The Tumbler (translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths), wherein we’ve a collection of miniature verse works that investigate how ‘a bird spreads its wings’ in moments of cultural unrest. Of Kyra Simone’s recent Palace of Rubble—a collation of prose vignettes spooled from a vocabulary inherited (or appropriated) from the front page of the New York Times and the daily news cycle. Of Pasolini, and his La rabbia / Anger… A collection of poems in sequence that antagonise the politics of mediated attention so as to stage an interrogation of the between-space of page and screen. Of Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air, and its tooling a chain translation of Ibn Arabi’s Tarjuman al-Ashwaq / The Interpreter of Desires so as to develop a study of the translator’s space, their labour, and elucidate the creative potential of conversation and creative exchange via concentrating on the distance a poem can travel.
Be it Jeffrey Vallance’s lifelong and Columbo-like scrutiny of spiritual esoterica—Stanley Schtinter’s anti-curatorial, lyrical antagonisms—or our forthcoming publication of the verse-prose of Reza Baraheni, the near-novelistic poetry of Dolors Miquel, or the epicism and revolutionary aspects of childhood as underpins the work of Mario Benedetti, Tenement aims investigate the margin between formal distinctions rather than think through any co-habitation of forms within a catalogue.
Our list hopes to blur categorisation, to build a conversation in series between titles, and to see what kind of arguments and ideas emerge via the act of simply putting one book beside another.
MUEUM by SJ Fowler is published by Tenement Press and is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
By SJ Fowler.
Fruitless orchard lines the graceless square barricade of the blockade. It stops the crowd amassing and overwhelming the gate. Planted from memory, from some gardeners’ notes, a recollection of blueprints, is the line of tall, absolutely un-tropical, trees. They are oddly tall, like certain people, swaying above even the spiked tip of the obstruction doors. They have foliage only upon their upper reaches, where it’s too high for men to climb. In that regard there has been fidelity to how it used to be. Outside the first Museum. Old we might say, rather than first. Who can say what Museum was first? That is for a Museum of Museums. Something likely to be on its way.
The trees slough their dander down upon the queues, and into the courtyard, onto the staff and public alike. Though they aren’t alike, in countenance or conduct. In tiny insectoid woollen stars the spores of these trees come down and cling to rough cloth. They also find their way, in miniscule shards, like hairs on a fish, onto the fingers, skin and eyes of the lucky. For many, in doing so, they cause red eye, hacking coughs and irresistible itching. The trees have been implanted in memory of the trees. Practicalities be damned. It has been mooted that were they once replaced with plastic replicas, that their rain had irritated the wrong curator. Plastic trees would still harbour the past. I can see the argument. Some say sacrilege, and controversy. But there would then be no consequence for human health. So, what would be the point? To just be observed, to be looked at? For the public to say, this is what they looked like? Rather than, this is what they are?
It occurs to me they are plastic, and there is a machine, or machines inside, which produce the fluff. The idea makes me satisfied, because what a creative thought that is. And what kind of toxicity that would produce—using that word properly. But one step at a time, we’re not at the ‘what’s worst for human health above all other factors’ stage quite yet. We’re getting there. The fact is, do we know why the original Museum would’ve have planted such painful, ugly trees?
Particulars are not the worry.
In the forecourt, before the gate, flanked by our barracks, and leading to the main entrance, clumps of inane-in-appearance bushes line the curves of gardens and circle the iced surfaces of the mostly hidden ponds. No fences surround them. We get a few pleasant splashes per day. The bushes are there to listen. See what the chatter is on the way in. I am young, but old enough to know when they were inert. The microphones are not well disguised, and that is the point. If you see them, then you are seen looking.
We go out into the courtyard for our breakfast every day, in a very strict routine. It’s every day we do that. Ideal, to eat early. We wait until the trees have ceased their shedding. There is a small guard shed to shelter, if it is brutally cold, as it often is, during a season or two. Our house, as it’s known, the barracks, is white, with two floors and a mansard roof. It is surrounded by firs and thuyas, flowerbeds and paths, which are plastic, and once dumbfounded us all, individually, like a historical vision. We were used to nothing, when each of us got our jobs here, as guards.
When we first laid eyes upon these places and plants, some thought them a mirage, those that had been on the teams. But, as I’ve always said, hallucinations tend to fade. It’s not like things are bad enough for them to be necessary. As they were when we were doing that work, cleaning things up, getting our hands grubby. Before the antagonisms this would have been nothing. But over time their permanence makes them seem more real than they are. The feeling that they are not true, that they are at odds, is afforded only to the nostalgic. Those who cling to a notion of the organic and artificial. Which seems, to me, spoiled. I suppose this is the point of plastic flowers.
We guards are sat around small circular tables, eating. Here comes a visitor host, in a green jacket. At first, they are waving to us, in the distance, so they don’t cause alarm. You never can tell. There is a friendly repartee between the guards and the hosts. Green jackets and orange jackets. There is some gentle mockery, some industrial enmity. But not a real rivalry, really. Guards are guards, mostly ex-service, with some civilians recently, as we die out, and visitor hosts are what they are without a specific and notable previous career. They are chosen because of their willingness to be pliable in the face of cataclysmic human rudeness.
This host is careful. She asks if we slept well? We are all with pink eyes from lack and the older guards murmur as they young smile. The dead of night last night crosses my mind, but no one, including me, wants to hear about my dreams. Some people don’t even have them or say they don’t remember them. The visitor host continues to chat idly, about the gateway, and the fields and the sweep of country, as she calls it, gesturing behind her, to nothing in particular. A little wind kicks up with her, she Is talking about production, how many visitors they expect today. She glosses over. In her hand is a little, hardened clump of mud. It looks like it has passed through a worm. She works it finely between her fingers, never breaking it from a bubble. I am repelled, as is intended, by her growing enthusiasm. I wonder where she found that clod? She is a program worker, an early riser, she has probably been up and about for hours already. Not ingenious enough to be a curator. In her defense, she looks as though she has recovered from a dire illness. She flaunts her jacket and swipes her thin hands around us all as she talks over the older guards. How familiar she seems, between plastic flowers, to loom above us. Her eyes peep out like lumps on a bent plate, all milky, the same soft colour as those horrid dreams we don’t have. She casts a brief glance over me, and smiles, nodding to approve of my shape. She has fake rabbit skins on her belt, hanging from ear to tail, ready to be bunched by the lengthy ears in her outstretched grip for a tour or live display. She will likely play a Neolithic hunter today, or maybe a Roman. The plastic rabbits are bound up with a red bow. Weird she looks at me so intently, I feel miffed for a moment. I won’t show it, just in case the others think it means more than it might. So much gossip. Nothing to it, I would never even prolong a conversation with a host. Soon she obviously begins to consider her gestures pointless and withdraws her hand. Then she is gone, I lose track of how because Greg is sat next to me, moving a bit.
What’s her name again? Someone asks.
We amble through another morning. It strikes me that everything, although it remains the same, is not. Not a novel idea. One that’s regular, when I think of myself thinking. I have the urge to write it down. Today is different. To write down: today is unusual. That would be odd too, to write as though my particular feeling might be worth recording and not to then write, today is different because I am writing down today is different. As though menial work—endless, taskless, almost pointless labour might be the subject, for noticing change. Not in this world or any before it, where people are employed to displace space and suffer the depredations of indirect danger.
Beside me sits Greg, his long aimless face caught by the illumination of the massive courtyard lamps that are being craned into place by engineers, readying for the opening. It lights him in such a way that I can perceive the fine details of his face, and that’s not good, as anyone who has had to have sex from the front will attest. He looks like a nice crocodile. The hairs growing from within his noise, curling their way out of his nostrils, the splayed pores of his cheeks, the wet edges of his lips, the shell in his eyes. Greg is bent, dripping into his food bowl, round shouldered, in his blue collared shirt, his clipped tie and his black hewn trousers, Museum logo stamped upon the arse cheek. His mouth trembles with each mouthful. A typical demoted intellectual, a less typical survivor, the opposite of that visitor host. Just grateful for food and lodgings and things to see. What he must have seen, people’s spread, the slow destruction of skeletons. Worse than me really. It’s certainly easier to be watched than watch. You can control the tempo etcetera. I don’t know. Something has affected him. It’s hard to escape seeing him all limp. He means well.
From Greg to the gates, all seems indebted to an awkward rampancy, an innocent success. Maybe it’s a weekend. We can see the public, like a raring set of harmless dogs. The queue is bunching here and there, through the railings. Once we were outside too. The materials seemed continual then, as though the Museum was fashioned as one piece and had always been so. That is the point. Just as Greg, and many of my other colleagues, seemed timeless when I first met them. A fatiguing thought, that these bags of jaws were once unknown to me.
This is an excerpt from MUEUM by SJ Fowler, published by Tenement Press. MUEUM is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SJ Fowler is a writer and poet living in London. His collections include Fights (Veer Books, 2011), The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner (Eyewear Books, 2014), {Enthusiasm} (Test Centre, 2015), The Guide to Being Bear Aware (Shearsman Books, 2017), I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and The Great Apes (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has become known for its exploration of the potential of poetry, alongside collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and performance. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the Tate Modern, The Photographer’s Gallery, Wellcome Collection and Southbank Centre, and he has presented his work at over fifty international festivals, including Hay Xalapa, Mexico; Dhaka Lit Fest; Hay Arequipa, Peru; and the Niniti Festival, Iraq. Fowler was nominated for the White Review Short Story Prize, 2014, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as Isabel Waidner’s edited collection, Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018).
Fiction submissions to 3:AM are now open. We’re looking for stories on any subject, in any genre, at any length from flash fiction up to about 5,000 words. The only requirement is inventiveness of style or structure — or, preferably, both. No prescriptions on what this might look like in practice — a short, sharp sentence of Lutzian terseness is as welcome as a Bernhardian rant — except to say that it has to have a voice or a timeflow that distinguishes it from the sort of stuff that usually wins accolades.
Here are some great stories to show you how it can be done: Helen McClory, ‘Take Care, I Love You’; Camilla Grudova, ‘Notes From a Spider’; Cathy Sweeney, ‘The Woman With Too Many Mouths’; Linda Mannheim, ‘The Young Woman Sleeps While the Artist Paints Her’; Jo Lloyd, ‘My Bonny’; Rob Doyle, ‘John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’; Joseph Scapellato, ‘Snake Canyon’; David Hayden, ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’; Kevin Barry, ‘See the Tree, How Big It’s Grown’; Gabriel Blackwell, ‘( )’.
The list goes on, of course, but ultimately your preferred mode of adventurousness is entirely up to you.
To submit your work, please send no more than 5,000 words to the Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood, at [email protected]. Longer submissions may be accepted, but please don’t submit more than 5,000 words in the first instance and please do indicate the total word count in the body of your email. Be sure to include your name and a short bio with your submission. All submissions will receive a response by March 15.
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