#0 - Entrance to the rodeo where we begin to weave

Your weekly link rodeo by Osmanthus. This week includes work from Euus Press, Tech Won't Save Us, Kathryn Hummel, and more.

Jan 19, 2024

Welcome to the Inaugural Osmanthus Rodeo.

The silver awning precedes the ping of a slung pebble against the teenager’s speeding car. The sidearm on that guy, local legend, some said he could’ve been a Heisman Quarterback as a seventh year senior. The barbecue attendee caught whispering about that guy’s muscular inflection. Smoke wafts up into the yews. That sometimes you stand enveloping in the smoke spotting shapes or flailing your arms, yelling white rabbit white rabbit to ward away the smoke. When the day becomes clear, that the dew disappears that the mind does not chase illusory tree branch snaps. You realize that guy simultaneously pinged the teenager’s car and served you a hamburger.

Weekly Link Rodeo

Every Friday, Osmanthus will post 5-6 links that resonated with the editors. The weekly link roundup will always be concluded with a writing prompt. It is our hope that whether you are a fiction writer, poet, or multi-discplinary artist that you can take the links and use them as inspiration.

An interview conducted by Carlos Soto-Román, a Chilean poet and translator. Soto-Román interviews Scott Weintraub about the work of Juan Luis Martínez and ethic of literary disappearance and self-erasure of the author:
Martínez very easily could have entrusted the poems and their translation to an exiled compatriot. Or, might the Chilean Martínez have discovered the Swiss-Catalan Martinez and together they collaborated on these poems (as a kind of Situationist joke or prank)? Perhaps “Juan Luis Martinez” was an invention or avatar of Juan Luis Martínez, an orthonym that recalled Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s extensive use of heteronyms.
Only adding to the ominous nature of this find was the fact that the Swiss-Catalan Martinez’s final book was published in 1993, the same year as the Chilean poet’s death.
Two Stories by Lucy Zhang. “Relocation Package” and “Evaporation” are speculative pieces that reveal themselves through their relationship to setting, and the sometimes blurred lines between make-believe and the actual experience. Construction workers, tech, CS:GO aimbots, and other fun things in the workplace speculative fiction pieces.
“‘Text as Protest’ : the recent work of Kathryn Hummel, Matthew Turner, Catherine Vidler, Louis Armand & John Kinsella (Hesterglock)” on Equus Press. For a minute, I siloed myself in the Wayback Machine. Stuck in the archive from September 2021, I navigated here. The post talks about the body segmented into geometric abstractions, sometimes pixels on a screen and sometimes enshrined in hotel rooms. Recently I found myself walking the city blocks around my neighborhood in alternating geometric patterns. Traversing large avenues at some points. Each loop I amass details of the buildings, restaurants, and other landmarks. Sometimes I come to a standstill, as myself and the surroundings buffer their way.
“How the Mirror World Distorts Our Reality”, a Tech Won’t Save Us podcast with Naomi Klein, where she dissects the current moment and social media’s practice to control the logic of the current socioeconomic climate. In Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, she writes about the extreme violence used against bodies to de-center the Self. This podcast talks about crisis and the space it clears for a doppelganger to emerge.
“Indexing” by John Kinsella (original video here on Youtube)
‘Play it again’ by Kathryn Hummel. Original audio here. Original text here.
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