0:06–0:09
Close in on the birds. They are European robins. Their red chests flash. They batter each other in a flurry of wings. There is a noise of feedback.
0:10–0:11
Close-up of the man’s microphone.
0:12–0:15
The robins’ fight fills the screen. The feedback grows painfully loud.
0:16–0:19
Blackness. Silence. Then birdsong.
Voice-over, man’s voice, P: “Its territory. Listen.”
0:20–0:24
Messy apartment. P looks through LPs. A younger man, D, watches.
P says, “These are rare old field recordings.” He shows a record to D. We can’t see the cover.
D says, “What’s with the title?”
P says, “A translator’s mistake, I guess.”
0:25–0:27
A glass-topped kitchen table, messy with the remains of a meal. Fixed shot. The table is vibrating. Silence.
0:28–0:31
Close-up, P’s face.
Voice-over, D: “And you’re doing something like that?”
Voice-over, P: “Something like that.”
0:32–0:35
The table again. Now in its center two robins are fighting.
They spasm furiously amid plates and glasses. A candlestick falls. Cut to black.
0:36–0:38
P stares at his television. The screen is blue, text reads, “Scanning for Signal.”
P’s own distorted voice comes out of the speakers: “… like that.”
0:39
Close-up of a robin’s eye.
0:40–0:42
P walking down a crowded city street.
Voice-over, P: “There’s a signal and I can’t tell if it’s going out or coming in.”
Unseen by P, one person, then two people behind him raise their heads and open their mouths skyward as if shrieking. They make no sound.
0:43–0:45
D whispers, “What are you trying to do?”
0:46–0:48
Darkness. A thud.
P stares at a window. On the glass is a perfect imprint of a flying owl, in white dust—powder down.
Cut to the earth below the window. An injured owl twitches.
0:49–0:50
P in a café, talking to a young woman. We hear the noise around them. P’s words sound distorted. They are not in sync with his lips.
He says, “There’s a problem with playback.”
0:51
A man and a woman roll on the ground, battering each other. Their faces are blank. We hear the sound of wings.
0:52–0:57
Voice-over, D, whispering: “Would you recognize a distress call?”
D puts earphones on. We hear the crackling audio of a bird’s song. It grows louder, is joined by others, becomes a white noise of calls.
Cut to: a weathervane twisting on a steeple; a sped-up sequence of a plant changing the direction it faces; a battered old satellite orbiting Earth.
The birdsong gets louder. On the satellite, a light comes on. It shifts, points its antenna at the world and sounds below.
0:58–0:59
D sitting opposite P at the kitchen table. He leans in.
He says, “Listen.”
1:00
P stares at a computer screen. A message reads: “No files found.”
1:01–1:02
Close-up of D’s face.
He says, “Listen.”
1:03
Night. P stands naked at the foot of his bed. He raises his head and opens his mouth and his throat quivers as if he is howling. We hear only feedback.
1:04–1:08
D shouts, “Listen!”
P shouts, “No, you listen!” He slams his hand on the table.
D looks down. There is a perfect imprint of P’s palm on the glass, in white powder.
1:09–1:14
Undergrowth. Close-up of the robins’ fight.
Cut to P, holding the microphone, staring. He is naked. His skin is covered in tiny scratches. There is no sound.
The robins abruptly stop fighting. They separate. They stare at P.
1:15–1:19
Blackness. The sound of a needle hitting vinyl. A crackly robin’s song begins to play.
Voice-over, P, whispering: “You listen.”
Title card: “Listen the Birds.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
MATTHEW BAKER’s children’s novel If You Find This is just out with Little, Brown. His stories have appeared in journals such as One Story, American Short Fiction, and New England Review.
RUSSELL BANKS is the author of many novels, most recently Lost Memory of Skin, and six fiction collections, including A Permanent Member of the Family (both Ecco), the title story of which was first published in Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie (Fall 2013). “Last Days Feeding Frenzy” is © 2015 Russell Banks.
MARTINE BELLEN’s (martinebellen.com) This Amazing Cage of Light (Spuyten Duyvil) is forthcoming in September 2015. Her monodrama opera, Moon in the Mirror (text cowritten by Zhang Er and music by Stephen Dembski), will be performed in September 2015 at Flushing Town Hall in Flushing, New York.
THOMAS BERNHARD (1931–1979) was a novelist, playwright, and poet whose works include Correction, The Lime Works, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, The Loser (all Vintage), as well as Histrionics (plays) and The Voice Imitator (stories) (both University of Chicago). His Collected Poems, translated by James Reidel, is forthcoming from Seagull. Bernhard, who lived in Austria, is widely considered to be one of the most important writers of his generation. His poems in this issue are from Gesammelte Gedichte: © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1993; all rights reserved by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
THALIA FIELD has published five collections, most recently Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions). Experimental Animals, A Reality Fiction, from which her piece in this issue is taken, will be published by Solid Objects.
DIANA GEORGE’s recent fiction has appeared in Birkensnake and The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing. Based in Seattle, George writes for the port-truckers newsletter Solidarity.
Cover artist CAROLYN GUINZIO (carolynguinzio.tumblr.com) is a writer and photographer. Her books include Spoke & Dark (Red Hen), Quarry (Parlor), West Pullman (Bordighera), and Spine (forthcoming from Parlor in the fall of 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Drunken Boat, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
BENJAMIN HALE is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve). His contribution to this issue is the title story of his forthcoming collection Brother Who Comes Back Before the Next Very Big Winter (Simon & Schuster). His nonfiction writing on primatology has been anthologized in Best American Science & Nature Writing (Mariner Books). He teaches at Bard College.
EVELYN HAMPTON is the author of Discomfort (Ellipsis Press) and We Were Eternal and Gigantic (Magic Helicopter Press). She lives in Oregon.
KAREN HAYS is a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award recipient. Her essays have been published in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, Passages North, The Normal School, and Iowa Review.
NOY HOLLAND’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird (both FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). Her first novel, Bird, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in the fall of 2015.
GREG HRBEK is the author of Destroy All Monsters, and Other Stories (University of Nebraska). His new novel, Not on Fire, but Burning, will be published in the fall of 2015 by Melville House.
CHRISTINE HUME is the author of three books, most recently Shot (Counterpath), and three chapbooks, Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (Ugly Duckling), Hum (Dikembe), and Ventifacts (Omnidawn), the last of which is an early s
tage of the longer project from which her work in this issue is taken. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University.
LUCY IVES is the author of four books of poetry and prose, including nineties: A Novel, which will be reissued in June 2015 by Little A. She is the editor of Triple Canopy.
MICHAEL IVES’s books include The External Combustion Engine (Futurepoem) and Wavetable (Dr. Cicero Books). He teaches at Bard College.
ANN LAUTERBACH’s most recent book of poems is Under the Sign (Penguin). A new collection of her essays is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2016.
SARAH MANGOLD is the author of Electrical Theories of Femininity (new from Black Radish) and Household Mechanics (New Issues). She lives near Seattle.
MIRANDA MELLIS is the author of the forthcoming Demystifications (Solid Objects). Other books include The Spokes (Solid Objects), as well as None of This Is Real (Sidebrow), The Revisionist (Calamari), and two chapbooks, The Quarry (Trafficker) and Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs).
CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The City & the City and Embassytown, as well as the forthcoming fiction collection, Three Moments of an Explosion (all Del Rey), from which his story in this issue is taken. He lives and works in London.
SEQUOIA NAGAMATSU’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, Tin House (online), Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Psychopomp and teaches at the College of Idaho.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of the recent novel The Sacrifice and the story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep (both Ecco). She is currently the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford.
MATTHEW PITT is the author of Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize and Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer Prize. He teaches creative writing at Texas Christian University. The illustration to his piece in this issue appears courtesy of Kevin Somers (kevinsomers.net).
JESSICA REED’s poems have appeared in Spiral Orb, Kudzu House Quarterly, Fourth River, and Isotope. She is working on a poetry manuscript on atoms, in dialogue with Lucretius.
JAMES REIDEL’s most recent translations include Robert Walser’s Fairy Tales: Four Dramolettes (New Directions, cotranslated with Daniele Pantano), a portion of which was published in Conjunctions:60, In Absentia (Spring 2013); and Thomas Bernhard’s Collected Poems (forthcoming from Seagull).
MARGARET ROSS lives in New Haven and teaches creative writing at Yale. Her first book, A Timeshare, is forthcoming from Omnidawn. She is currently working with the poet Huang Fan to translate a collection of his poems into English.
A visual artist and poet working in cross-genre media, MEREDITH STRICKER cocreated, with composers and beekeepers, a performance involving colony-collapse disorder; a form of this performance was published at the Conjunctions online magazine in 2014. She is the author of Tenderness Shore (National Poetry Series/LSU), Alphabet Theater, (Wesleyan), and Mistake (Caketrain).
LILY TUCK is the author of two collections of short stories and a biography of Elsa Morante, as well as six novels that include the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Siam (Overlook) and the 2004 National Book Award–winning The News from Paraguay (Harper). In the fall, Grove/Atlantic will publish her The Double Life of Liliane.
WIL WEITZEL’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He received a 2014 NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship at the Center for Fiction.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
EDITOR: Bradford Morrow
MANAGING EDITOR: Micaela Morrissette
SENIOR EDITORS: Benjamin Hale, Joss Lake, J. W. McCormack, Edie Meidav, Nicole Nyhan, Pat Sims
COPY EDITOR: Pat Sims
ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Jedediah Berry, Wendy Lotterman
PUBLICITY: Darren O’Sullivan, Mark R. Primoff
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Matthew Balik, Laura Farrell, Grayson Gibbs, Ariana Perez-Castells, Dan Poppick, Zoe Rohrich, Natasha Wilson-McNair
CONJUNCTIONS is published in the Spring and Fall of each year by Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504. This issue of Conjunctions is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Copyright © 2015 by CONJUNCTIONS
Cover design by Jerry Kelly, New York. Cover art by Carolyn Guinzio (carolynguinzio.tumblr.com). Gaps in Knowledge, 2014. Digital photographic collage. © Carolyn Guinzio 2015; all rights reserved by the artist.
ISBN 978-1-5040-1838-8
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