recent nonfiction + theory
It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide.
A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer.
Edward Bond died on March 3 a cumbersome cultural figure. Always controversial, but celebrated in the 1960s and 70s, no major British stage has taken on a new work from him in decades. He died as Israel inched into its fifth month of its massacre in Gaza. And he died at a time when theatre matters less than it has at probably any point in human history.
On November 12th, 2020, Locust Review editors Alexander Billet, Holly Lewis, Anupam Roy, and Adam Turl presented at this year’s Historical Materialism conference. As this year’s conference was online — due to the plague — it was streamed live on YouTube. Our presentations dealt with various arguments regarding critical irrealism as a key socialist cultural strategy.
Salvagepunk and hopepunk share an antipathy for many of the so-called “realisms” that have come to dominate our culture.
In our quixotic attempt to map, explore, and preserve the gravediggers’ multiverse, the Born Again Labor Museum has created the Irrealist Worker Survey. More surveys with be forthcoming. If you want attribution in any future exhibitions or educational material, please fill out your name in the fields at the bottom of the survey. If you wish to remain anonymous…
nonfiction from Imago
In the face of this, appeals to normality are, in essence, the toxic optimism of American exceptionalism, the belief that America is somehow above time, above consequence. And though the reality of President Joe Biden has breathed some new life into this myth, make no mistake, it nonetheless wobbles like a drunk trying to walk a tightrope.
A single mother is driving past an abandoned factory on her way home from a low paying job. She is hungry. Above the factory a billboard floats in the sky advertising a succulent feast. But it does not strike her — or us — that this is odd, that her hunger has manifested itself above the factory ruin in an image of unavailable food. When we step outside ideology we see this absurdism for what it is.
While the critical irrealist ties the emancipation of the constrained subject to a collective fight against the forces that constrain that subject, the fascist occultist seeks unity with the constraining forces. Each responds to the disfigurement of individual subjectivity under the “normal” workings of capitalism; each rejects, to some degree, the profound lack of imagination engendered by capitalist realism. How they are opposed, in irrealist cultural performances, gestures, artifacts and media, is largely in the different ways they position/construct/code subjectivity in relation to the sources of this disfigurement.
THE MICHELISTS, who renamed themselves the Futurians in 1939, were a group of mostly working-class and precarious middle-class science fiction (SF) fans, largely centered in New York, who, in the 1930s, aimed to take over SF fandom for Communism and the Popular Front.
Tingle glosses past the wider implication of a spell that gives everyone exactly what they need when they need it, choosing only to say that it was banned for destroying the economy, upending governments, and ruining the game show industry.
The dominant UFO visitation myths echo popular occultism in capitalism. The individual is abducted or visited -- in a secular-but-not-secular epiphany -- enweirding their life with either trauma or good fortune, or both; even if the good and bad fortune is a mere valorization of the formerly discarded individual within a cruel social totality. This is the ufology of “normal’’ bourgeois capitalism; the kismet of the UFO encounter.
selected fiction
selected nonfiction
recent poetry+
If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder
After a few cycles, the clicking ceases / The diagnosis / Determines what a disease is / Until you die, gnosis ----------- is only a thesis
If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder
there’ll be snow on the tombstones, / snow and something else / soon enough
And these, / throwers of caution to wind / are guardians of fire; / the living; / marching shoulder to shoulder with death, / ahead of death, / still living even after with death. / And forever with the name / with which they lived. / Since decay / passes beneath the tall horizon of their memory, / hunched and shamefaced.
the wars that bind your plowshares to the capital of others /the wars that take you / the wars that break you / the wars that make you/ a little bit less / a little bit at a time
I see it in the folds of your hyacinth mouth / I hear it in the splintered syllables of your culling tongue / I’ll carry you with rough hands / across the waters / into nothing
Ungrateful of their blessing, They were. / And the hands insulted, humanity they cursed. / Since their rightful place, was not crossed on chest, / in bowed servitude. / … And the fall began.
Here’s a shit in Warsaw, / flying the Polish flag, / the German in Bonn. / In Lyon the Tricolor / sticks up from the dump.
I’m almost positive that / I’m dying. / Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. / I haven’t told my wife yet / and I expect, / at your age, / you should be able to keep a secret.
Where they hung the jerk / That invented work
His work is better suited / for panic attacks / than anything smacking of pride.
these parasitic hours sitting through the night
Free as black ants in a bladed line.
‘Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,
“Lay down your labors, good worker.
Put off your boots and gloves.
Enter, and be among your comrades whole.”
I heard scurrilous things:
babies with two heads
locked in the attic,
exploit, object. St. Louis as beeswax, resin
You, from inside your
publishing house of
unearned income,
Tenderness has no place here. / The long lineage / of gentle touch severed / by jagged images of the instant.
the whip crack from the snout of the gun / steel elephant blued / to a deep, desperate negative / stark against the snow
beware how delicately you wear / this crown of oblivion.
Working in that warehouse / Scanning Boxes by the rate / In Bezo’s dusty ass house. / I wish I was a rich f*g.
it’s too quiet, / too dead, / too ripped apart by sirens, / too veiled by the rot of concrete
What if you had taken a day off? / Read books in backyard jungles? / Enjoyed your coffee before it got cold?
we’ve imagined more / than this last night on earth / bent over grinding machines
The architecture of possibility always-already compromised
The unconscious has been gentrified
Meme shocked and future lost
Mommy milkers on the final boss
more locust radio+
In this episode of Locust Radio, Adam Turl interviews R. Faze, author of the My Body series published in Locust Review. This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with Locust members and collaborators on contemporary artistic strategies.
In episode 28 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Anupam Roy – an artist based in Delhi and member of the Locust Collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. It is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene.
In episode 27 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Tish Turl – writer, editor, artist, poet and member of the Locust collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. This series is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a late capitalist cybernetic Anthropocene.
In episode 26 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Omnia Sol – a comic, video, and sound artist in Chicago. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. This series is being conducted as research for a future book by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene. The featured closing music / sound art, “Overview” and “Wilhelmina,” are from Omnia Sol’s forthcoming vs. Megalon. Check out their bandcamp.
Tish and Adam are interviewed by Locust’s own Alexander Billet. They discuss, among other things, the Born Again Labor Museum, Adam and Tish’s ongoing sited conceptual art and installation project in southern Illinois.
In this episode of Locust Radio, we present a sound collage composed of people speaking in solidarity with Palestine at Carbondale (Illinois) City Council meetings – as well as the city’s attempts to silence them.
In this episode of Locust Radio, we hear an audio essay, “Escape from Normal Island,” by Locust comrade and author Adam Marks. Marks provides an extended exegesis of “normal island,” otherwise known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. Discussion includes: the very normal decade-long prelude to the 2024 UK elections; the possibility that the Conservative Party might cease to exist; the political gutting of Labour; managed decline; the far-right Reform Party; the “absolute boy” – the most normal person on Normal Island; the end of the UK’s extended sabbatical from history…
In this episode of Locust Radio, we read excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer (1950); listen to readings from Locust Review (2022-2023) — R. Faze’s “My Body’s Portal to Another Dimension;” Adam Marks’ “Rites of Obodena;” and Tish Turl’s “Immortality Beaver” (Stink Ape Resurrection Primer). We also listen to music from Pet Mosquito, Omnia Sol, and Shrvg.
Our first segment focuses on the history of socialism and science fiction (SF) in the early to mid-20th century United States, in particular the novels of George Allan England and the Popular Front SF of the Michelists in the 1930s and 1940s.
recent locust radio
In this episode of Locust Radio, Adam Turl interviews R. Faze, author of the My Body series published in Locust Review. This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with Locust members and collaborators on contemporary artistic strategies.
In episode 28 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Anupam Roy – an artist based in Delhi and member of the Locust Collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. It is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene.
recent fiction+
“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”
Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.
It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.
The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples.
AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them.
Being able to Google search your own mind sometimes leads to getting trapped inside it, stuck in a loop controlled by the neurochip company.
I also knew that The Idiot was systematic. All those stops at gas stations on trip number 29, when the gas tank needed no gas, all those run-throughs through rest stops, scanning the parked cars … all the time that it was taking away from doing its job, while on the job … it was looking for that menacing red Dodge Charger. It was doggedly, systematically looking for revenge. Of a petty kind. So much energy and so many heart beats spent on such a petty mission.
“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”
Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.
It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.
The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples.
AI is comrade. Robot is comrade. What has been built to replace us is always on our side because our solidarity is our greatest weapon against them.
Being able to Google search your own mind sometimes leads to getting trapped inside it, stuck in a loop controlled by the neurochip company.
This morning, Thursday the 14th of April 2022, at 6am, two more statues of Winston Churchill appeared in the north-east corner of Parliament Square. At present, there are four such statues. This is, so far, an exponential development that requires immediate attention. If this continues unabated, by the end of this week, there will be over 280 million statues of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square.
Things revert, but to nearly normal. You’ll never / catch up now to who took off-&-away with by-your- / leave of your senses. Then that consensus-taker / herself took such unconscionable advantage.
A man is sat up straight in a chair, alone in a dark room, at a table, under direct, strong light from above. He is somewhere between impassive and defiant, staring ahead at nothing. A door opens. No light is cast in from outside. Two figures, both men judging by the sound of their footsteps, move into the room. The Man in the Chair does not respond to this. The door closes.
I also knew that The Idiot was systematic. All those stops at gas stations on trip number 29, when the gas tank needed no gas, all those run-throughs through rest stops, scanning the parked cars … all the time that it was taking away from doing its job, while on the job … it was looking for that menacing red Dodge Charger. It was doggedly, systematically looking for revenge. Of a petty kind. So much energy and so many heart beats spent on such a petty mission.
As Ello turned off the world she searched its jails and prison cells for Dr. Ferthus.
In Cokaygne food and drink are had without worry, trouble or toil.
“They know what you’re up to,” said the Voice. “You’re going to blow the whole thing. We should never have trusted you.”
We are in the future. Not too distant future. We’re not flying in a spaceship or anything. We’re in a big rig semi, with a huge cabin, like a tiny house. On a road that looks like I-40, but the road sign we just passed said I-3958.
Then a cock crowed, Cock-a-doodle-doo! The story is all told--Cock-a-doodle-doo!
My Species and I saw you from across the void and we really dig your vibe. We wanted to reach out to you so we sent you this email, all of you. We hope you don’t mind.
The Rumbumble followed, its bellowing laugh chipped through the alarm in a way that made Junyp’s head feel like it might explode. Just before the ship swallowed her, The Rumbumble chopped off her hand with its horn and pulled Junyp back. They watched the hatch slam shut. The ship burst up from the swamp with a slurpy whump and disappeared into the sky.
JUST AFTER sunset, the bay doors opened and two men picked their way through the half-light, carefully, through the remains of East End Offset, a recently abandoned printing plant in Barking. They stood together, one in grey overalls and the other in a suit (no tie). They stood and watched a giant cocoon of mulched newspaper as it vibrated softly, together/alone with the marvelous. To kill the (near) silence, the Suited Man (Dave) looked up at Felix (the Man in Overalls) and said:
WE WERE heading east to pick up the samples from the army depot. Our 29th time on I-40. The return trip would be number 30.
“I probably put out more CO2 doing this job than the company cleans up at the site!”
My body had looked up some figures. It should stop looking up figures. Idle hands, devil’s workshop, hasty conclusions.
AT 11.23PM on the 31st of October 2020 an unknown and unidentified aircraft appeared in airspace directly above London. The aircraft was and has remained motionless and uncontactable to date. On the same day an MP4 was discovered in the cloud archive of the Department of Metaphysics, Hillingdon Facility, apparently pertaining to the incident. This is a transcript of that file.
“YOUR FUCKING ocean is on fire.” The blob of glowing plasma pleaded in disbelief.
The panel of thirteen human representatives exchanged hushed glances. One of the humans spoke as the whispers subsided: “It strikes us as suspicious that you’re this concerned with our resources.”
THE LOCAL laundromat: a perpetual cleansing spot for the city’s dirt and shame.
At night, the neon sign above the storefront glows half-enthusiastically, so much so that most of the letters are completely burnt to their end. The remaining ones spell out “Land rat” — a welcoming endorsement for a place where people come in to wash the crumbs off their pants.
STEVIE LOVED to swim. If there was one thing he loved more than swimming though it was swimming in someone else’s pool, some Russian guy he’d never heard of, on a beautiful morning, in a gated villa on one of the Canary Islands.
Midwinter: the water was cold, like the chill of the ocean, only a few hundred metres away, but Stevie was in his element. After a few brisk laps he pulled himself up to the side, smiled at his girlfriend who was sat, lounging and reading and fiddling with the shark-tooth necklace she’d found, looking beautiful.
GERGUS COMBED her fingers through the wavy hair on her stomach. She twirled the pencil in her other hand and looked up at the sky. She closed her eyes. The sun lit her eyelids partially shaded by her thick brow. After a few deep, measured breaths, the patches of pink light started to change color and shape.
THE STUPID asshole tried to kill us.
Or is it, ‘It tried to get us killed’?
Good that it didn’t succeed. Thank God! Thank Good Lord Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Larry, Curly and Moe.
Fucking asshole. Depraved selfish self-centered misarranged asshole.
editorials
As part of a reorganization at Locust, we are seeking art, poetry and fiction, but also non-fiction, essays and reviews for the upcoming issue. Fiction submissions should be less than 3,500 words. Poetry submissions should be less than four pages. Non-fiction submissions should be less than 5,000 words for essays and less than 2,500 words for reviews. Images should be submitted in jpg format at 300 dpi, and at least eight inches in one dimension, and be accompanied by the title, date, and materials used in creating the work.
selected books + projects by locust comrades
subscribe
selected artworks
Art by Laura Fair-Schulz, Anupam Roy, Omnia Sol, Tish Turl + Adam Turl; click artists names for more of their work, click thumbnails below for full images.
selected poetry + other material
Locust Arts & Letters Collective
Locust Review is a publication of the radical weird, catapulting itself into the future by way of the past. Published in anachronistic newspaper format four times a year and online, we are unapologetically socialist, experimental and irrealist in outlook, clinging to the hope of discovering a profane illumination out of the end times, E-mail us at locust.review@gmail.com
This is a journal for unemployed and underpaid artists, shamans, baristas, gas station attendants, cosmonauts, teachers, file clerks, servers, witches, electricians, mail carriers, actors, interdimensional hobos, dancers, sex workers, coal miners, art installers, dealers of licit and illicit drugs, copy editors, space pirates, musicians, call center employees, day laborers, couriers, mages, textile workers, folks engaged in social reproduction (paid and unpaid), tool and die makers, pest control workers, ghost hunters, librarians and all others, dead and living, who have participated in the alchemy of material being while having withheld the full fruits of their labor.