LITRO MAGAZINE Issue 140
Diaries
February 2015
Litro Magazine 44
www.litro.co.uk
ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7
FICTION • ESSAYS • INTERVIEWS • CULTURE
Shashi Tharoor Chuck Palahniuk Claire Thurlow Ariel Dawn James Mitchell
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Magazine • Issue 140 • Diaries • February 2015
CONTRIBUTORS05 EDITORS LETTER09 TRYING TO DISCOVER INDIA 11 Telling the truth behind Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery
Shashi Tharoor
MUCH BOTHERED WITH BUFFALO21 Unearthing the pioneer women of the emigrant trails
WHILE HE SLEEPS31 Quick Flash
WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE32 A look through the pages of a dystopian diary
INTERVIEW38
Talks to us about Fight Club II
Chuck Palahniuk
THE NIGHT I GOT LOST ON THE WAY HOME FROM CHINA40 “…And I will think of you when I’m dead in my grave”- Tom Waits
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto Online Editor Eric Akoto online@litro.co.uk Magazine Editor Dan Coxon dan.coxon@litro.co.uk Online Short Fiction Editor Katy Darby katy.darby@litro.co.uk Film & Media Editors Declan Tan & Robin McConnell declan.tan@litro.co.uk filmandmedia@litro.co.uk Online Flash Fiction Editor Jennifer Harvey flashfiction@litro.co.uk Book Reviews Editor Jennifer Wade reviews@litro.co.uk Arts Editor Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk Contributing Editors at large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer Laura Hannum Marketing & Sales info@litro.co.uk General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971. 1- 15 Cremer Street, Studio 21.3 London E2 8HD Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.
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Contributors Litro Magazine • Issue 140 • Diaries • February 2015
Claire Thurlow
Shashi Tharoor Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN UnderSecretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra.
Claire Thurlow is a writer and researcher. She first stumbled across the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails during the ten years she lived in the USA, and recently retraced some of these steps. Her discovery of diaries written by the wagon train women inspired the novel Claire is now working on. She has recently contributed to an anthology, Reflections on the South Downs, and is a Postgraduate Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex, reviews books for the Historical Novels Society and teaches in Surrey.
Ariel Dawn Ariel Dawn lives in Victoria, British Columbia. Writing is featured in publications such as Ambit, Black & Blue, Paper Swans, minor literature(s) and Ink Sweat & Tears. She spends her time reading Tarot and poetic prose and writing a novella. @ariel__dawn
Chuck Palahniuk
James Mitchell James Mitchell is, mostly, an advertising strategist and copywriter in London. But when he’d rather tell the truth, he writes speculative fiction, and is currently finishing a Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck. His stories have appeared in The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Kill Screen and Universe among others. ‘What Good Looks Like’ was Highly Commended in the first Orwell Society Dystopian Fiction Prize. His novel, The Here And Now, is nearly there. Hurry him up @jamescmitchell.
Chuck Palahniuk’s novels include the bestselling Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Lullaby and Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of the non-fiction profile of Portland Fugitives and Refugees and the non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Jamie Lynch Jamie Lynch was born in Dublin in 1972. He has lived in several different countries but is now settled in Dorset. He has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since he was a child.
EDITORIAL Dear Reader, The New Year is traditionally a time for looking forward. We plan and reprioritise, making resolutions and setting our course for the year ahead. Those of us who keep a diary are literally opening the first page of a new book. The next year sits blank, waiting for us to fill it. Litro #140—Diaries—looks both backwards and forwards as it considers the uses that diaries and journals are put to, and the secrets they can share. They open a window onto the past in Shashi Tharoor’s Trying to Discover India, a story that explores the truth behind Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery. Columbus is in the process of being recontextualised by historians, and Cory Doctorow (@ doctorow) recently referred to him as a “butcher/rapist/genocide” in a widely read tweet—here’s no better time to read Tharoor’s alternate version of his story. Claire Thurlow also explores the uses of the diary to the modern historian, in her short essay Much Bothered with Buffalo.
She delves into the diaries and journals of the women who travelled America’s emigrant trails, and finds their stories candidly preserved in paper and ink. The second half of this issue looks forward to days to come, with While He Sleeps by Ariel Dawn, a poetic piece of flash fiction that tries to imagine the subconscious communication between the pages of a diary and those written about within. Then James Mitchell opens the pages of a journal written in our dystopian future, in What Good Looks Like. Mitchell’s predictions for the direction our schools are taking feel eerily prescient, and should act as a timely warning. Finally, we chat with cult hero Chuck Palahniuk about the themes behind his bestselling novel Diary, his current love of sequels—and his plans for Fight Club 2. If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the return of Tyler Durden, you won’t want to miss this interview.
TRYING TO DISCOVER INDIA The truth about Columbus and his impossible voyage
by Shashi Tharoor
It
is strange, now, so many years later, to be telling my story, writing this journal. I think back to that other journal, the one Columbus kept, day by day, sitting at the desk in his cabin as the waves rocked the Santa Maria, his quill scratching away, recording it all—leagues sailed, the direction of the wind, his hopes and fears. Mine will lack that immediacy, because all I have are a few scraps of notes and my memories, the memories of an old man far away from his land and his people, writing in a language that is not mine, for readers in another world. But if I do not tell my story, who else will? So let me begin as Columbus did, with the weighing of the anchors. It was, I remember, a Friday—I had already learned their days of the week, and this was the day of Venus, goddess of beauty, sprung from the foam of the sea—Friday the third of August, by the Christian calendar the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two, when we set out from the bar of Saltes, at the confluence of two rivers, the Tinto and the Odiel, to sail into the unknown. I remember it well, that last glimpse of Europe. It was a grey day, overhung by those European clouds that block the light without providing the blessed release of a real rain. Many families were at the quayside, the women in their long skirts and high collars trying to hold back their tears, their children waving, little hands receding with the shoreline. The men waved back, too, some of them, for most of Columbus’ crew were from around these parts, and many did not know when, if ever, they would return to those who now bid them farewell. Then they went down to row, for the sails were limp, and we were counting on the ebb tide to take us down river. I had no one waving me goodbye, but I stood on the deck, hearing the liturgy of the friars of La Ribada on our port side, chanting to the greater glory of their unforgiving God, as the men on deck knelt and crossed themselves in supplication. I was still there as we went over the bar, watching the coast of that young—and to me quite new—continent disappear, and I thought of my own departure from Calicut, silent like a pariah passing a sleeping Brahmin. We had set sail at eight o’clock, an auspicious time, by my calculations, just before the day entered the last four-fifths of the Panchami and the moon tenanted 13 degrees of longitude in Sagittarius, which would have required, if you believed at all in my astrological accuracy, a series of rituals to propitiate the planets—rituals I am sure Columbus would not have had time for. So we cast off in time, and there was a strong breeze to sea, which took us southwards as the sun rose, a scarlet stain across a glowering sky. The breeze took with it too another ship, not of our fleet, the last of many that were all supposed to have left by the previous day, carrying away from Spain the Jews who had failed to undergo the Catholic baptism decreed for them by Columbus’ blessed Sovereigns. I had seen these people, kin to the Yehudis of Cranganore who had found safety in my homeland after an earlier European persecution (fleeing Romans then February 2015
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MUCH BOTHERED WITH BUFFALO Unearthing the pioneer women of the emigrant trails
by Claire Thurlow (non-fiction)
What
the Native Americans, questioning their treatment by the government; and she is clearly distressed by the discovery of a woman’s corpse, dug up by wolves, blue ribbons still intact in her hair. On days when the wagon train rests, Agnes tells us she is doing laundry, or stewing apples, though she longs to swim in the creek or play leapfrog with the boys. Although it seems that this diary was written only as a private outlet for thoughts and emotions on the emigrant trail, the document was preserved long after the journey had ended, and, indeed, after its author had died. Can we assume that Agnes kept it to remember that turning point in her life? Did she intend it as a record of family At each end of the Reading Room, carved history to pass on to her children and in thick cedar wood, hang triptychs grandchildren? As the teenage Anne Frank depicting the history of this western state. recorded in her own diary in 1944, “I want One of the images shows a wagon train to go on living even after death.” negotiating the Barlow Trail at the foot of Mount Hood. It is a picturesque scene, Of course, there were some, like Elizabeth with the tall trees, mountains and rivers Wood, who started their diaries with the which contribute to Oregon’s astonishing intention of getting published. By the natural beauty. It reveals little of the mid-nineteenth century, pioneer journals nightmare of hauling wagons through had become commonplace, although impenetrable forest, across freezing rivers those published had generally been and down treacherous mountainsides, or by men. Elizabeth was unusual in that the personal tragedies caused by illness, she was female and single, following injury and death. In the 1850’s this land in the footsteps of successful women was yet to be ‘tamed’ by white settlers, travel writers of the time, such as Isabella but increasing numbers were tempted to Bird Bishop with her book A Lady’s Life brave the gruelling journey to the Oregon in the Rocky Mountains. Territory as part of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ The original diaries written by the emigrant to expand the boundaries of the American women were small notebooks that would nation. With the promise of cheap, or even take up little space. Paper and ink was free, land, many saw it as an opportunity in short supply on a journey across the makes us start writing a diary? The dawning of another year? Or perhaps the beginning of a whole new life? I am sitting in the sunlit Paulson Reading Room at the University of Oregon in Eugene, reading the diaries of women who have been dead for over a century; women who embarked on such a great adventure that they decided it needed to be committed to paper in the pages of a daily journal. As part of my research for a novel which follows the journey of a Victorian woman from Liverpool to Oregon, I am digging into the archives to read the true stories of those who travelled the emigrant trails in the mid-nineteenth century.
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MY SECRET PLACE by Barry Smythe
In
1975, Annabel had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday. One of her presents was a large leather bound diary. Annabel was a diary person. Always had been; wrote in one religiously every day. To Annabel, a diary was important, she never went anywhere without one. Either she carried it under her arm or it was in her shoulder bag. With one exception: on walks she let Zita, her pet Golden Labrador, carry it in her mouth. Annabel’s older sister was away at nursing college in Bristol, so their parents only saw her at odd weekends or holidays. With Annabel, they were pleased she had chosen to study locally. Earlier in the year, she’d won first prize in the Ewell College poetry competition. The theme of the poem had to be about something you cherish, up to 500 words. She’d thought of her diary straight away. Annabel had called her poem My Secret Place. As a little twist, she’d told close friends there were clues in the verse that described where her diary was hidden. This secrecy came about because her mum was nosey and over protective. While Annabel was out, her mother searched her bedroom for drugs, contraceptives or anything else that could lead her precious daughter astray. Of course, Annabel knew. Then finally, at last, she had a brain wave. She found the perfect hiding place for her diary. Her mother would never dream of looking there. Annabel was slim and petite with long dark hair from her mother’s side. At five-foot-sixinches, with her model looks, she was every young lad’s dream. On this Saturday afternoon, Annabel was sitting in her favourite secluded area at her local park with Zita. The forecast was warm and sunny, so the dog was quite happy to lie at Annabel’s feet while she doodled a poem in her diary. It had just turned 4:30 p.m. The sun was still high, the rays making short shadows in the hot afternoon. Sweat was already forming on Annabel’s forehead as she sat making notes with inspiration. The smell of wood and dry earth filled her senses while a lone cricket buzzed behind; its back legs grinding together like a motor constantly revving up. Suddenly, Annabel heard voices followed by moans and panting. Zita’s ears pricked up. Annabel rose slowly. Her dog was already on all fours in anticipation, looking up and wagging its tail. The panting and moaning grew louder. She crouched down and carefully parted the Hawthorn bramble. It was two men, half-naked. One was lying on top of the other one with their trousers down by their ankles. Annabel recognised the young man on top. It was Geoffrey. He’d been a former college student and an old boyfriend of her best mate, Jennifer, who’d recently emigrated with her parents to Australia. Without a moment’s hesitation, Annabel scribbled away furiously in her diary what was unfolding before her eyes. Now to get away, she thought. Mustn’t let them see me. February 2015
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WHILE HE SLEEPS Subconscious communication between the pages of a diary
My
by Ariel Dawn
steps spill rain from trees and the trees reveal the old dream faces. I write to them and Rhys sleeping and Lucy who lives in these woods. Apologies, stream of consciousness, echo poems dying for the echo: I roll these notes in leaves with ribbons bright enough to catch their eyes. In the hollows and deep branches I slip these scrolls in abandoned nests and coloured bottles. Under the bitter cherry my diary with the belts and the pin on a string, I keep it buried: the hole and earth under my nails, all the invisible living.
‘Antonia, Petulant at the Window’ by Holly Day
February 2015
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WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE The school of the future
by James Mitchell
Wednesday 22/3 QUESTION OF THE DAY! “If Sally has a Burger and @Jason has five Burgers and zainab has no Burgers, how many Burgers could they each have if they share? Show your working.” This question is easy of course. I am only putting it down to show you what I have to answer now I am in Sparrow table. Sparrow table is for people who hide the fish so they run out of battery and people who throw their Burgers at lunch and now it is for people like me. I think in this question I must be a zainab. I am not obviously. I am Ruby Clancey, I am eight (nearly nine), and I am going to be a vet when I am old enough and can find a sick animal. I checked out Sparrows at freetime on my picturetable, they don’t look so dumb. After lunch today we did Describing, so here is a sparrow Description: they have funny claws like a wild chicken and a toolong tail and the one on my picturetable has a boggly eye like nathan when he puts pens up his nose. So not that great you might think. But Diary, I have missed the key features! A sparrow is more like: These Five Things Will Make You Love Sparrows 1.
Tiger Stripes
2. Beak is like a Snail’s shell 3. Always Concentrating 4. Flies 5. Etc. Etc. means “and so on”. This is the last of the handy tricks Mrs Pointer told us before the smiling man came and said we’re going to let you go. Mum once said that if you love something you let it go, so Mrs Pointer must be very happy. Wednesday 29/3 QUESTION OF THE DAY! “What is the next number in the sequence?” 1 3 5 7 9 ??? What a mystery! How can you predict the future? It is very simple, because a ‘sequence’ is a hidden pattern. The answer is of course 11 (ELEVEN) because it is the next of the odd February 2015
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AUTHOR Q&A The cult author discusses Diary, Beautiful You, and his plans for Fight Club 2
with Chuck Palahniuk
Q3Your latest novel,
Q1
In your novel Diary, you write that “Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.” To what extent should we take your characters as a self-portrait? Is Misty a self-portrait of sorts? Is Peter? Of course Misty is me. All of my characters are. In the case of Diary I was processing my reaction to how the old wheat-land small towns I remember from childhood are being gentrified with vineyards and kite festivals. That, and I was exhausting the guilt I feel about neglecting all of my close relationships every time I get deep into the writing of a book. It’s as if I take a monthslong trip and when I return all except my closest friends have dropped me.
Q2
Do you feel that the diary is in danger of being relegated to history, with teenagers putting the minutiae of their lives on social media for everyone to see? Are we losing our sense of privacy? Diaries are very much alive. The act of keeping one is now referred to as ‘journaling.’ A blog is an entirely different animal, it’s a performance of a public self intended to engage an audience. An act of exhibitionism. The older I get the more I admire those people who burn their diaries and take their best secrets to the grave.
Beautiful You, explores and satirizes female sexuality, a bold topic for a male author. What made you want to write this book? Did it require any special research?
Please don’t believe all the book jacket copy you read. My intention was to satirize arousal addiction, which is generally understood to be a male issue. By depicting women with the problem, I’d hoped to make it less threatening to male readers. As for research, I was forced to engage the professional services of thousands of world-renown sex experts. Those months of strenuous study have left me hardly more than a dried husk of my younger self. This is how I must suffer for my art.
February 2015
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THE NIGHT I GOT LOST ON THE WAY HOME FROM CHINA by Jamie Lynch
“…And I will think of you when I’m dead in my grave”- Tom Waits
The
beginning of this century found me, mentally, in exactly the same place where the end of the last century had left me: existing pursued by shame. The shame had followed me all my life, from place to place. This place happened to be the overlit bar of an airport in Amsterdam. Physically I was running from Greece to China. I had worked in Greece for four months, in a town call Oresties on the border with Turkey and the border with Bulgaria, and the border with Macedonia. Border towns, in my experience, are rough. Triple border towns are…well, you know. I had gone to Greece too quickly, with too little preparation because I was running away from shame somewhere else. I had callously told my family that “I might never come back”, making a deposit in the bank of shame. The journey involved flying to Athens, changing onto a tiny, terrifying plane to Alexandropolis, which didn’t live up to the grandeur of the name, and then getting a taxi for what seemed like forever to my new home. I was dumped out in the dark, over charged, ripped off and lost as usual. “They screw you as you leave the airport”, as good an axiom as Nietzsche ever came up with. I lived in a cockroach infested apartment. The couple next door fought, physically, constantly and loudly, the lady upstairs was insane and screamed her way through the night. I went up to her door once and it was covered on the outside with scratch marks from human nails. When I stood on my balcony—yes, I had such a thing, and it was the only place I could escape the army of roaches—I saw the rats, dogs and Albanian illegal immigrants fighting over the food. Never bet against the rat. The first day of work I turned a corner and walked directly into the chest cavity of a boar, gutted and hanging outside a butchers, so I started my teaching career there marked with blood. There was no way to go anywhere from there. I didn’t drive, there were no buses, there was only the train which I jumped on and used to run away almost the some moment I discovered it existed. That train journey was like a hallucination. I couldn’t get control of my breath. I listened to Cornershop’s song ‘It’s good to be on the road back home again’ (“drinking to my friends and drinking to my foes, for both keep a young heart moving…”, “for I’ve lost myself searching for what I ain’t, it’s good to be on the road back home again, again…”) and to John Cale’s Paris 1919 album (“I suppose I’m glad I’m on this train—again”)over and over on that journey. But before that I lived in that place for four long months, like a very poor man’s Graham Greene. The town was built in concrete squares. It was built in the 1970s by Greeks returning from emigration to Germany. That hopeful beginning made the reality even sadder, for almost nowhere I’ve ever been has been more ugly. I taught English to teenagers who were more bored even than usual teenagers and the fact was that they had every right to be. They killed themselves at a rate of one or two a month by getting drunk and crashing on small motorbikes. It was ever so slightly like being at war, the amount of young men killed and injured. Also, being on the border between Greece and Turkey it was a military town and so pretty rough round certain bars in the nighttime. It was easy for a foreigner to find trouble there, it was sent to your table, compliments of the house. It was difficult to get across that border although it was walking distance from my flat. They made sure that when the Greek side was open the Turkish side was shut, and vice versa, most of the time. I did get over once and found that the scene on the Turkish side was a mirror image of what I saw on the Greek side, the same old men with dark moustaches sitting outside little cafes under bird cages, drinking the same short, strong coffee. Same food, same culture—nearly—but I don’t advise saying this too loudly in the little bar district of good old Orestias. This is not an original insight but it is none the less true or important for that. I was aware that Greece would collapse economically well before most economists, the roaches told me and the roaches know things we will never know. They made me sign a kind of roach official secrets act to get out of there alive so I can’t tell what they told for fifty years. I got to know them, respect and fear them. People who say they aren’t afraid of roaches mean they aren’t afraid of ONE roach or that they have never shared a small flat with countless thousands of them. Believe me you know who’s in charge under those circumstances. I ate Yearas, or Kebab depending on your politics, drank Heineken and went slowly insane for those four months before I fled. February 2015
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