Mailing List


Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

A twilit bedroom Silence Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk Slow pan of ruffled bedsheets in close-up—magnified sheets like an Arctic mountain range Shitty camera quality—that of CCTV or a sex tape, colours drained Zoom out Slow tracking shot reveals one by one, as in a Tarkovsky film, a series of sleeping faces—silent apparitions of celebrities—Taylor Swift—Kanye West—Kim Kardashian—eyelids shut, lips loose, mouths ajar—a slumbering parade of pop royalty—not in their usual livery but nude—trashily nude—classically nude Most of the body parts—arms and torsos and necks—are purpled with tattoos Most of the nipples—black or pink—are pierced A pink Caucasian cunt in extreme close-up Blackout   ‘At once both superficial and deep,’ a man’s voice intones—Kanye West’s We fade up on Kanye, wearing a silver jacket, sat in a swivel chair at a mixing desk being interviewed by journalist Zane Lowe ‘Both deep as a canyon and superficial as a razor blade,’ Kanye says, eyes wild, head dipped ‘So, you think you’re pushing the boat out?’ Lowe asks ‘I’ve reached a point in my life,’ Kanye answers loudly—as drums begin a 4/4 beat—’where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting’ Freeze-frame close-up of Kanye’s face, mouth agape—an oil painting filter is now applied to Kanye’s facial image—bass drum and hi-hat kicking—and now all at once a synthetic accordion and descant recorder come in doubling a jaunty melody—the freeze-frame of Kanye’s face cuts for a split-second to an image of Freddy Kruger—then black—and Kanye’s rap enters:   For all my Southside niggas that know me best I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex Why? I made that bitch famous   A glittering legend flashes up on the screen:   ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ ‘KANYE WEST’ ♫   ♦   Shoulder to shoulder, half concealed by the sheets, half revealed by the sheets, in that enormous bed they lie, the celebrity bodies in Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ video And lie in more senses than one, all the bodies being at once hyper-real and hyper-fake, seemingly real yet actually prosthetic But, once become an image, isn’t everything real?

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

feature

January 2011

Futures Past: Monumental Memorials of Modern Berlin

Leila Peacock

feature

January 2011

Cities display a worship of history in the monuments and memorials that they choose to erect, through which the...

poetry

March 2017

Two Poems

Uljana Wolf

TR. Sophie Seita

poetry

March 2017

Mittens   winter came, stretched its frames, wove misty threads into the damp   wood. fogged windows, we didn’t...

Art

December 2013

When We Were Here: The 1990s in Film

Masha Tupitsyn

Art

December 2013

‘I remember touch. Pictures came with touch.’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required