Timothy Dyke, Lest List | L*STS

  

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Lest List

Timothy Dyke

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests

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lest I come across as arrogant

lest I remind him of the time he crashed my VW bug

lest he retreats to demon metaphors

lest the reference to palm forests triggers the Merwin digression

lest I misunderstood the assignment

lest she asks me for the hundredth time if I’m seeing anyone

lest he drops to his knees and starts praying for my salvation

lest they are out of lavender syrup

lest we accidentally run into each other in Safeway

lest anyone accuses me of using A.I.

lest it was the 50 mg and not the 10 mg

lest I am overcome by spiders

lest I am ever expected to compose a sonnet

lest they ask me to join their affinity group

lest proclamation of love becomes mistaken for act of love

lest you confuse Neil Diamond with Neil Sadaka 

lest you confuse Naomi Klein with Naomi Wolf

lest you confuse the Chris in the Star Trek movie

with the Chris in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie

lest this turns into one of those grief sessions where 

we are expected to hug and share feelings

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When I heard of the L*ST publication project, I knew I wanted to participate. I am drawn, as a reader and writer, to lists and to wordplay. I could not stop thinking about how versatile that L*ST construction is, and as I started replacing that asterisk with vowels, my brain zeroed in on the word, “lest.” It seemed to offer some potential for creating something interesting. What did the word mean exactly? I looked it up on dictionary.com: “for fear that.” I was inspired that a list of lests could imply a list of fears, trepidations, and dreaded outcomes. I immediately began working on my lest list. The sample dictionary sentence was: “He kept his notes by his side, lest faulty memory lead him astray.” If I couldn’t read the independent clause that comes before the comma, I would wonder what preceded the lest. I like that act of wondering. In my list, I have only supplied the clause that follows the lest. I will leave it to readers to imagine what comes before.

Timothy Dyke is a writer and teacher living in Honolulu, HI. His memoir, Backbends, was published by High Frequency Press in 2025. High Frequency Press will publish Century of Empathy, his hybrid work of autofiction, in late 2026.

Jessica Curry, Wannabe | L*STS

  

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Wannabe

Jessica Curry

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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I want to be as cool as Charlotte Gainsbourg

I want to be as sexy as Sophia Loren

I want to be as profound as Emily Dickinson

I want to be as impassive as Zadie Smith

I want to be as elegant as Kristen Scott Thomas

I want to be as tiny as Sarah Jessica Parker

I want to be as radical as Mary Wollstonecraft

I want to be as loveable as Claire Danes

I want to be as funny as Maya Rudolph

I want to be as beautiful as Rachel Weisz

I want to be as sharp-witted as Nora Ephron

I want to be as heartfelt as Joni Mitchell

I want to be as impressive as Maya Angelou

I want to be as devastating as Carrie Fisher

I want to be as wise as Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I want to be as charming as Maggie Aderin-Pocock

I want to be as chic as Katherine Hepburn

I want to be as rock and roll as Miki Berenyi

I want to be as defiant as Rosa Parks

I want to be as cheeky as Lou Sanders

I want to be as influential as Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I want to be as positive as Isabelle Allende

I want to be as elliptical as Deborah Levy

I want to be as hip as Kathryn Hahn

I want to be as brave as Harriet Tubman

I want to be as iconic as Frida Kahlo

I want to be as unwavering as Eleanor Roosevelt

I want to be as blonde as Cameron Diaz

I want to be as fierce as Virginia Woolf

What is a little bit sad is that I very rarely want to be me. 

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I am a huge writer of lists, and love reading other peoples’, too. I was very depressed during the Pandemic and when I was finally starting to be able to function again I started making lists in my diary to inject some structure into my day. This list from 2022 was born from my remembering an absolutely hilarious song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where she sings about the intensity of girl crushes: “I wanna kill you and wear your skin like a dress, but then also have you see me in the dress.” Chef’s kiss. My list questions why we can feel this beautiful—bordering on obsessional—appreciation of other women, but are so rarely able to harness that love and reverence for ourselves. The title, Wannabe, is homage to the ultimate lady bosses, The Spice Girls. 

Jessica Curry is a BAFTA-winning composer, writer, game developer and broadcaster. She was co-founder of internationally acclaimed game studio The Chinese Room and her music has been performed around the world. She started writing in earnest during the pandemic as an accompaniment to her latest album, Shielding Songs. Her work draws on themes of disability, feminism, culture and the peculiarities of modern life. Her first non-fiction work, How to Deal With Everything We Lose, was published by Calque Press earlier this year. 

Misha Tenster, On Birds and Poison | L*STS

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On Birds and Poison

Misha Tentser

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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Saturday morning, Beth called to ask if I wanted to go birding at the wildlife refuge west of Syracuse. Beth was the elderly landlady of my hovel, where I drank until my vision fuzzed. I didn’t set anything on fire or host raucous parties. I sat crisscross on my bed and turned my misery inward, which demanded plastic jugs of Kentucky Deluxe from the corner liquor store. A boy-faced man named Ralph owned and operated the liquor store, the last extant business in a strip mall on the city’s West Side. 

Beth didn’t know about my drinking, which I preferred. When she called, I thought it’d be more suspicious if I declined. So she scooped me up in her Jetta booming Hall & Oates’ “Crime Pays” and zoomed the back roads to the refuge. In her car, the AC wheezed, pumping sticky August air flavored with mango freshener. I was drunk enough to imagine the wispy clouds on the horizon as smoke tendrils from God’s curly pipe. I wasn’t drunk enough to feel like a subject of the divine. 

Beth explained the cardinal birding rule, that the birds’ wellbeing came before the birder’s desire to photograph, record, or gawk. I’d never birded with rules before. Last summer, I’d spotted a crow on its side, motionless in the grass at a park across from the Erie Canal. I dribbled some water onto its beak to confirm its aliveness. The crow’s eyes moved slowly in their sockets. 

Beth parked. She and I ambled down a board walk overlooking a swamp packed with geese. We sat down on a bench. Beth pulled binoculars from her bag and searched the landscape for a juicier character like an eagle or heron. Too hot for them today, she said. What do we do? I asked. Nothing, she said, wait. 

I felt Hall’s baritone and synths bounce around my skull. I watched the geese preen and wiggle their necks. I recalled picnicking with my parents by a scummy pond, where a goose mom chased me and bit my butt cheek. I was six and unacquainted with keeping my distance. The goose bite bloomed into a royal welt, which I showed off at school in the boy’s bathroom for my friends. Every time I saw a goose since then, my butt cheek stung in recognition.

I thought my drunkenness might wane after forty minutes of sitting with Beth. Instead, it rippled into my extremities, which started to spasm. I tucked my hands into my jean pockets, but my lips pulsed. Beth stared out at the swamp. 

After three years of sobriety, I’d convinced myself I could drink casually. I started again with good bourbon, which delivered a warm burn to my esophagus. Eventually, the burn disappeared and I couldn’t afford the fancy whiskey regularly. I didn’t understand what precipitated my desire to drink again. A relapse of malaise, maybe. A desire to self-sedate? 

You ok? Beth asked. Yes… I said, it’s lush. And it was. Sun beamed through the cirrus clouds onto water lilies and shrubs, whose green extended as far as I could see. Willows drooped into the swamp, as if bowing to the water. It’s true, she said. She packed away her binoculars and we walked back to her car.

On the drive home, groves of trees shot past us on the country road. At home, I waited by the window until I saw Beth’s car pull away, then walked to the liquor store. I wanted to bask in the cool air and wine fridge lights. The fridge’s glow beamed onto my hand skin and exposed my winding nerves. The wine called to me. The whiskey did too. I stared the bottles down until they blurred and danced. 

Ralph didn’t watch me linger. He watched a horse race on his phone and twirled his mustache hairs. I considered buying some shooters and drinking in the park, beside the aqueduct where ducks gathered. But Ralph’s face, soft and oval, gleamed like my mom’s. I bought a single scratch-off. On Ralph’s t-shirt, an embroidered golden eagle head stared me down.

I wondered about flight. One spring, when I flew to Syracuse in a tiny Cessna, the pilot pointed out a skein of sandhill cranes soaring beside the plane. I was concerned the cranes would get sucked into the Cessna’s propeller, but they glided gracefully, then vanished. I didn’t know when, precisely, the birds merged with the night, or if they took a left turn towards some wetlands to rest, then nest. From my window, the cranes looked like bloodied arrows.

My apartment’s porch steps creaked under my sneakers. By the front door, I sat in the rocking chair left behind by the previous tenant. The chair’s frayed cane poked my glutes. Cars rumbled down my street and sizzling garlic scent wafted from a neighbor’s open kitchen window. Sweat gathered in the ditches of my knees. I scratched the tinny lotto film with a quarter until the symbols came into focus. I won nothing. I kept scratching until the symbols faded too. 

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This essay is about the last morning I drank booze, two and a half years ago. I don’t have a soft spot for birds or landlords, but I value the suggestion that attentiveness is an act of generosity towards self and others. My current apartment in Syracuse has gorgeous, tall windows. From my desk, I’ve seen groundhogs, cardinals, possums, and a skunk. The skunk was the size of a kid’s tricycle. I think he was benevolent.

Misha Tentser is a poet from Tucson, Arizona. His poems and essays have appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Adroit Journal, Yalobusha Review, and on North Country Public Radio. Misha's first book, American Loon, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2027. He teaches writing in Syracuse, New York. 

Erin Keane, State Fair Vanitas | L*STS

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 State Fair Vanitas

Erin Keane

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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Yes, yes, to fried everything on a stick, to the duckling slide and the poster with the ten-point plan defending the ducklings’ dignity, to the hired-out Pirate Ship and the Tilt-a-Whirl’s impeccable lettering and questionable gears; yes to a roasted ear of Frankencorn, to a pork butt sandwich dripping with grease; yes to the overfed, pampered pumpkins waiting to shock us all at weigh-in, yes to 4-H tobacco, dark stripped or burley, to quilts too beautiful to throw on the bed, to the sheep in their couture gowns, the goats lost in perverse thoughts, and the pigs, the pigs, who could say no to their downy bellies heaving in the barn-dank, straw-scattered air? And especially yes to the culinary wing on the final weekend, when the lemon tassies and meringue-topped pies and hummingbird bundt cakes with cream cheese glaze have spontaneously sprouted their own personal crops, soft green mold patches furring across slumped-in sides. Give me decay on display, blue-ribbon proud. Yes, yes, we know it’s all in vain, but yes to being here anyway, whether we take Best in Show or die trying. 

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I love the Kentucky State Fair, which I think comes through pretty clearly in this piece. There’s an overwhelming sensory assault that comes from combining a carnival, a flea market, and an agricultural competition in one space that I can’t help but respond to. I love the excessive food, of course, but also how the farm families showing livestock set up camp next to their prize animals, and how amateur gardeners, bakers, cooks, and crafters are competing just as fiercely for a ribbon and, like, a five-dollar prize. And my absolute favorite time to go to the Fair is later in the run, when the food exhibits have started to develop mold but are still on display. It’s gross in a very compelling way. I started this list knowing I wanted to end up in the culinary wing with the mold, hoping to write my way to understanding why I derive such delight from the ruined foods left out in the cases for us to admire. In the vanitas subgenre of still life paintings, human skulls and other transient objects are included to remind the viewer of the certainty of death (one of my favorite fixations) and to scold us about worldly pursuits—their idea is that in the end, all our petty little pursuits will have been in vain. This list is my answer to that: Of course we’re gonna die anyway. Of course the blue-ribbon cake is a temporary pleasure. Of course the hours of baking practice put into developing a contender for the prize can all add up to nothing in the end. But it feels good to make something intentional out of the chaos of ingredients, environment, and form, and it feels great when you surprise yourself with the result. It’s worth celebrating the choice to create instead of despairing. Nothing we do with intention and pleasure can possibly be in vain, even if we never win the big prize or leave a legacy that sustains across centuries. In a recent poetry workshop, one of my students identified a poem not labeled explicitly as an ars poetica, and I heard myself saying, maybe every poem is secretly an ars poetica, essentially making its own case for why we write in the first place. Maybe this list is one, too.  

Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poetry and the memoir RUNAWAY: Notes on the Myths That Made Me, named one of NPR's best books of 2022. She teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Naslund-Mann MFA program at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon.com. New poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Indianapolis Review, Solid State, and Forget Cool. Her recent writing can be found at HAD, Necessary Fiction, Essay Daily, MarchXness.com, and in the anthologies HIT REPEAT UNTIL I HATE MUSIC: The March Xness Anthology (Split/Lip Press) and ONCE A CITY SAID (Sarabande Books). 

Scott F. Parker, No God but God: Notes Toward the Essay as Unknowing

Learning means learning what cannot be learned; practicing means practicing what cannot be practiced; discriminating means discriminating what cannot be discriminated. Understanding that rests in what it cannot understand is the finest. If you do not attain this goal, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.

—Zhuangzi

Here I am once again digging into the dirt of self. It is for me a life’s work.

The essay, as I read it in the Montaignian tradition, begins in ignorance: “If a subject is unfamiliar to me, for that very reason I essay it.” With this ars essayica implying its converse: If a subject is familiar, I do not.

Isn’t an essay simultaneously an expression and interrogation of the self? According to Virginia Woolf, “Almost all essays begin with a capital—‘I think’, ‘I feel’,” and achieve “permanent value” according to their authors’ courage to “write of themselves.”

There is a paradox inherent to the essay form. The genre of the self, the essay is bound by the limits of self-reference such that the articulating self is itself inarticulable. The subject (I) is the only subject unsayable, the only subject unessayable. Yet the elusiveness of the self is what draws the essayist ever forward on the page.

Like the self it discloses and fails to disclose, the essay is inherently imperfect and imperfectible, chronically incomplete. Indeed, its virtue is its imperfect peculiarity. Meet a consciousness in its pages, never Consciousness.

But those limits, broad as they may be, exhaust themselves. The essayist, constantly disclosing, constantly discloses thereby the limits of disclosure. Beyond the essay, silence looms; beyond the self, the very world.

Writing, I come to know myself better, never in full. Therefore, I go on essaying myself, perhaps, to be.

If I keep Woolf’s council here, I must confess that while I don’t have my autobiographical I in mind but the essayistic I that is the name of subjectivity, I nevertheless have my own unique conception of this essayistic I, one no doubt born of innate characteristics, personal history, circumstance, and whatever contingencies else.

Taking a perspective, an essay is a form of thought. Whose? I go on thinking, even without insight into the origin of thought.

Yes, the essay begins in ignorance. Doesn’t it end there, too? Essaying a subject reveals the impossibility of concluding it.

“That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts,” Nietzsche tells us. “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Only the unthought thought is worth thinking; only the unwritten essay worth writing.

We venture into the unknown a breath at a time, pursuing the essay to the ends of its conception before trailing off in silence.

Que sais-je? If pressed, as the essay presses: not a lot, very little, almost nothing.

Call it the Yessay, call it the Sayessay. We embrace what is, even at the limit of our powers of conception, even beyond.

Philosophy for the Greeks was a form of spiritual practice, a way of transforming the self through the discipline of critical reflection. Having long abdicated this purpose, philosophy sees itself reborn in the form of the essay.

The philosophers I love most are those from Plato to Wittgenstein who most resemble essayists: Berkeley and Hume, Emerson and Thoreau, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Because the subject of the essay is the full expanse of the human mind, living essayistically means living at the boundaries of thought. With each discovery of new territory for thinking, simultaneously the corresponding discovery of a new thinker.

The essayist finds it possible to do philosophy in solitude, the blank page serving as the necessary other, the dialectic playing out between parts of the self. Thought thinking against itself the way Socrates thinks against his conversation partners. Partners, yes: it is a performance. The audience may be forgotten, but the audience remains.

To think out loud in the form of an essay is to perform thought as one would give a lecture consisting entirely of questions, none of them rhetorical. Who am I? What matters? How shall I live?

The questions are perennial; the answers are provisional. Each of us must write our own essays.

Montaigne: “I have no more created my book, than my book has created me.” Emerson (on Montaigne): “Cut these words and they would bleed.” But just as we write ourselves into being so too do we write ourselves out.

During pure concentration, writing becomes a form of prayer. The self, absorbed in its activity, loses itself in God.

Somehow, when I am least intelligible to myself is precisely when I experience myself as most truly who I am. What I am doing in such moments, I would have a hard time articulating, only that it is right right right as rain.

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” “No imagination can conceive of Him, nor can any understanding fathom Him.” The essayist, in his own way, converges with the wisdom traditions; his path, the path of contemplation. He discovers for himself that any thought pursued to its limit dissolves into silence as thinking exhausts itself, the object of attempted thought remaining unthought.

Does the essayist believe in God? No, the essayist doesn’t believe; the essayist essays. And God is. The rest is details, and details are where the essayist thrives, the tangibles by which he sketches the intangible, saying in relief what cannot otherwise be said, saying in silence what has no sound.

Would I be reading too much into the form if I wondered whether every essay is a devotional to God?

So often writing is discussed as a practice like other practices—yoga, meditation, running, say: in each of these, the activity brings (can bring) a particular quality of absorption that leads me beyond myself.

The only way out is through. The liberation from the self is achieved by the turn deeper into self.

Essays, David Lazar writes, “are so hopelessly, or better yet, hopefully, self-reflexive.” If thinking entails thinking about thinking and so on, n+1, before long the essayist draws a blank.

We study the self as a means of transcending it.

Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”

Torah as the interpretation of Torah, philosophy as criticism of philosophy, essay as ars essayica: in each case, the practice transforms the practitioner. The theologian, the philosopher, the essayist, each arriving at aporia finds no one arrives.

The essayist as disciple of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” He takes kenosis literally, emptying himself one thought at a time.

Neti neti leading toward the inexpressible absolute, the apophatic center around which all these words orbit.

Essaying, then, as a kind of monastic practice that can be entered into an hour at a time.

Insofar as I’m in a position to say, essaying is in my nature. Beginning in doubt, I proceed toward unknowing, and in the effort align my being with being. Through my unknowing I come to know myself as the unknower, as the unknown.

That which cannot be thought needn’t be unthought.

Until then: the thought is thought; the thought is doubted; the doubt is doubted. Eventually both thought and doubt dissolve into silence without opposite, and consciousness enters the realm of the uncontrasted, the unconceived.

What sounds like confidence is only the sound of a thought thinking itself. Essays humble me. Through them—through the process of composing them—I submit myself unfailingly to the unknown, the unknowable. (It must be a poor essayist who imagines his subject could ever fit itself to his prose.)

In pursuing thought to its end, the essayist makes of himself a being toward silence. Only beyond the limit of thought do we encounter wonder and awe, in the face of which the only thing to say, if something must be said, is, as the Muslims have it, La ilaha illa Allah.

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Scott F. Parker is the author of Teaching Without Teaching and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion, among other books. His writing has appeared in Philosophy Now, Tin House, The Believer, and other publications.

Avery Gregurich, Seeking: Max Headroom

 

This essay is in our Media Club series, an ongoing series of essays on visual media. Pitch us something! More details here.

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Seeking: Max Headroom

Avery Gregurich

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Max Headroom first found me the way that God always intended: inside my television, hiding out on Tubi. This was not more than a month ago. When I say that Max Headroom found me, I mean Max Headroom, the 1987 American TV show. I don't know what I mean when I say God.
     It’s important to work in specifics when thinking about Max. For a brief stretch there in the late 80s, he was everywhere. Billed as the world’s first “AI” TV show host, Max Headroom began as the British response to MTV veejays. On The Max Headroom Show, he spammed episodes, popping up between music videos and trolling viewers with fake advertisements, celebrity impressions, and other imagined soliloquies from a completely “computer-generated” person.
     Max got three different TV shows in total, some New Coke ads, an appearance on Letterman, plus his own Christmas special, Max Headroom's Giant Christmas Turkey. Somehow, I had missed Max entirely, all of it, including the TV broadcast hijackings that bear his name: the Max Headroom Incidents. 

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On the night of November 22, 1987, the broadcast signal of Chicago’s WGN-TV was hijacked by what the papers later called “television pirates.” During highlights of that afternoon’s Bears victory over the Detroit Lions, the signal cut to video of a person swaying back and forth in front of a twisting metal screen, wearing an oversized plastic Max Headroom mask. 
     If Max was speaking, it didn’t make it into the broadcast. Back and forth he went, swaying for about a half a minute, rocking back forth amongst waves of errant static. Then the video signal rippled, cut to black as engineers at WGN regained control of the broadcast. After, sportscaster Dan Roan appeared standing behind the Sports Desk next to a graphic of a football that said “BEARS BONUS”.
     "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I,” he said. “Actually, the computer we have running our news from time to time took off and went wild, so what we are going to do is start over from the top of the Bears and tell you once again about the 30 to 10 victory they had…"
     Approximately two hours after the initial broadcast signal attack, the hijackers targeted a second Chicago television network. During the middle of a public television broadcast of Doctor Who: Horror of Fang Rock, Max Headroom appeared again. This time he spoke.
     For around two minutes, Max Headroom delivers a series of non sequiturs with a panicked, semi-human voice. “Catch the wave!” he says and throws a can of Coke down, out of frame. He sings a line from The Temptations’ “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and hums the Clutch Cargo theme song. “I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds!” the person in the Max Headroom mask says near the end. The signal cuts back to Dr. Who just as a woman begins hitting Max Headroom’s bare ass with a fly swatter.
     The broadcast was terminated by the hijackers themselves.
     No arrests have ever been made in the case, and no suspects have ever been named. 

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How is it that we’ve made it here to the age of artificial intelligence realized, and Max Headroom is not around? 
     I’ve spent the holiday season switching back and forth between the hijacking footage and Max Headroom. I’ve written “WHERE IS MAX HEADROOM?” across the top of several different pages of a notebook, and taken very serious notes toward finding an answer. I started watching videos analyzing the transcript of the hijackings. Right now, my algorithms are actively working to feed me more Max. Instagram reels. Youtube videos. A targeted ad for an A.I. Max Headroom voice changer. Watching the show, I tried to steady myself with hack synopsis and trivial details. The usual suspects.
     As the weeks went on, I kept waiting for Max Headroom to mean more. To me, or the current moment, or to whatever it is that causes us to still do this. I’m sure that when it’s done right, essaying can look like a manic form of prayer. Hours spent (still) staring at screens, but now it’s been given a purpose. To craft an account that attempts to corral and mark our virtual wandering. A human life lived as a language learning model.

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Max Headroom begins in total snowstorm static. Then, scenes from a broken city. Skyscrapers rise in the distance. A chyron appears: 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE. Cut to a newsroom in full production panic, calling out to their reporter in the field, a man with a camera who’s delivered onto the scene via helicopter. Hanging out the side of the news chopper, he turns the lens towards his face and goes “live and direct,” staring straight down the barrel and holding the camera on himself.
     “This is Edison Carter, answering the questions other people are afraid to ask and what I want to know is this…”
     The pilot, “Blipverts,” is a remake of the original bit of Max Headroom media, the 1985 British TV movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. 
     Turns out that Max Headroom isn’t really about Max Headroom at all. It’s about his human component, Edison Carter, a man presented throughout the series as somehow both a rogue, fearless truth-seeker and the media conglomerate’s biggest star. In the pilot, Carter’s story gets pulled after he starts investigating his own network’s latest advertising technology, “blipverts”, or concentrated television ads that can sometimes cause viewers’ bodies to explode.
     While attempting to escape from Network 23 headquarters, Carter is thrown off a motorcycle and his head collides with a parking gate. Blood drips from the dented metal reading “MAX HEADROOM.” In order to find out what Carter has seen, the television network decides to feed a floppy disk Carter's consciousness into a computer. 
     Out comes Max Headroom, an A.I. construct of Carter, desperately reaching for language and wearing a tie. Carter survives the motorcycle crash, and using the memories stored in Max Headroom, exposes the network’s use of “blipverts.”
     With its sci-fi camp and cyberpunk weirdness, the show predicted a future that sure looks a lot like this one, a dystopia wrought from convenience and corporate greed, and defined by artificial intelligence, corporate journalism, digital surveillance, and the inevitable merger of technology and humanity. Heavy stuff for major network television in 1987. The show didn’t stand a chance against Alf or Dallas or Miami Vice. At the end of the year, Max Headroom landed at 101st in the ratings. It ran fourteen episodes in all. and only two of them aired after the Max Headroom Incidents.

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I am wondering why the Max Headroom hijackers have never come forward. Why they have never been found. If anyone else is still even looking for them.
     The Max Headroom Incidents were the last in a trio of high profile television hijackings during the late 80s, all of which happened during the peak of Max Headroom’s popularity. The first happened during an episode of The Falcon and the Snowman. At 12:32 A.M., HBO’s satellite was hacked by a person calling themselves "Captain Midnight." His grievance was clear, prescient still.
     The second happened two months before the Max Headroom Incidents, when a porno playing on the Playboy Channel was interrupted by a bible verse: "Thus sayeth the Lord thy God: Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Repent for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
     Suspects were identified and arrests were made in both cases. Captain Midnight was identified as John R. MacDougall, a satellite dish salesman who viewed the hack as a protest against HBO’s high subscription prices, which he cited as ruining his business. At the time of the hijacking, he was working a second job as a master control operator at a satellite teleport, and hacked the signal from there.
     Thomas Haynie was of course an employee of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and shared his selection of scripture from Exodus and Matthew while working as a satellite uplink engineer. Along with the Playboy Channel, Haynie was also charged with hijacking the American Exxxtasy channel the same night, charges that were eventually dropped. The pair were each sentenced to probation, a few thousand dollars in fines, and community service. Which makes me wonder why the Max Headroom hijackers have never come forward.
     The statute of limitations expired back in 1992. Their Wikipedia page takes special care to say that the people “responsible for the intrusion would no longer face criminal punishment should their identities be revealed.”
     There’s an element of youth to all of it, the idea itself and the construction of a set and sculpting of a Max Headroom mask and of course the bare ass and flyswatter, which in my head places those responsible in their mid-to-late 60s today. Given the pattern, it’s probably some one or several people who worked in satellite broadcasting in the greater Chicago area in 1987. I’d measure it a major success of my life, being able to track these people down and ask them why they did it.

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Near the end of the pilot, Edison Carter meets Max Headroom, his digital self. It’s played to be a moment of pure wonder, serene and profound. And who amongst us wouldn’t want to meet ourselves, to look them in the eye and ask them what it's like to be inside the screen?
     Part of essaying I think is seeing prophecy in old television shows. It almost seems quaint to say, but Max Headroom warned us about how much of our lives would occur digitally, online and disembodied. Individual realities constructed by algorithms. Max’s disappearance and subsequent absence from the larger culture feels purposeful.
     Still, you can find pieces of Max Headroom all around. When Netflix tries to buy Warner Bros., Max Headroom is there, hiding somewhere in the paperwork. Max is there when major TV networks partner with a gambling site to overlay betting odds on live news events. And Max Headroom is certainly there when Tubi runs an ad for ChatGPT while you watch episodes of Max Headroom. 
     I wonder how long now I’ll be followed by both Max Headrooms, whether it’ll be tomorrow or a year from now when I’m prompted again to remember both the character and the broadcast hijacker. A TV show reboot was announced a few years ago, so there’s still hope that they will ruin Max yet.
     “What happened to the old religions?” Edison Carter asks his producer Murray halfway through the series.
     “I don't know,” Murray says. “Television killed it. We have better miracles.”

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Avery Gregurich lives and writes in eastern Iowa, and organizes The Out Of Towners Reading Series.

John Haskell, Blow Me Away

This essay is in our Media Club series, an ongoing series of essays on visual media. More details here.

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Blow Me Away

John Haskell

(This essay is reprinted from John's new book, Trying To Be, recently published by FC2. Order it here.)

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Michelangelo Antonioni, still from Blow-Up, 1966.

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At the end of the last century an orator named F. M. Alexander codified a way of understanding, or at least thinking about, the body. It’s called the Alexander Technique, and it’s about aligning the body, or realigning it, taking it apart and thinking about how it might fit back together. The problem he found with the body was the way we imagine it. Or really the way we fail to imagine it, letting our bodies adapt to habits we don’t even know we have. We tell our bodies to disregard imbalance. If there’s pain, we say, ignore it, turn away, which leads to what Alexander called debauched kinesthetics, or erroneous perception, the idea that we have certain sensations—the information we get from the eyes, nose, muscles, et cetera—and then there’s perception, what the mind does with those sensations. Let’s say that when I stand, with my feet on the ground and my eyes facing forward, the right side of my body is slightly shorter than the left, as if I’m holding a weighted bag in my hand and the weight of the bag is pulling me down, curving me over. Instead of standing with the verticality of a plumb line, there’s a slight arc to my torso. And however I came to this posture, via trauma or repetition or necessity, over time I’ve made it my history. It’s how I perceive who I am, and the longer I live like this, holding the weight, the more the curve gets embedded in my flesh, memorized by the fibers of my mind and muscle, and more than a habit, it gets like a fact, and it is a fact, a fact of my body. The imbalance, caused by the weight in my hand, works its way up my arm to the muscles of my shoulder, my scapula pulling my neck, my neck pulling my clavicle, my clavicle pulling my ribs; and then my spine has to compensate. As does my mind, normalizing itself by convincing me that I’m standing as straight as an arrow. And even if I release the weight and allow my shoulder girdle to reposition itself, letting my psoas relax and my rib cage realign, although I might be standing verifiably upright, it feels weird. I’d painstakingly built this posture and now, being used to it, even without the weight in my hand, my body keeps holding the tension of holding the weight. Which is why Alexander looked at himself in mirrors, to see his body as if from outside, as if from God’s eye, as if God had an eye, and he did it because he didn’t trust what his body was telling him.

The movie Blow-Up was made in 1966, and like any movie, it’s partly about the time it was made, about the attitudes and assumptions that existed then, and were normal then, and now it’s like a documentary, showing how people used to live, how they stood and walked, and how they tried to be with other people. It begins with two wannabe fashion models knocking on the door of a famous photographer. They’re wearing outfits popular at the time, bright sleeveless dresses, hot-pink pantyhose, long bangs, wide eyes, and because it’s 1966 they’ve been reading Tiger Beat, watching Ready, Steady, Go! And wannabe wasn’t a word back then but what they want to be is clear. They want to be seen. That’s why they knock on the door of the photographer, and that’s why they audition for him. In the movie he sits in a big leather chair, twirling a coin between his fingers, not really paying attention to them and that’s when they notice, behind them, a rack of clothes, the latest styles from Paris and Milan, and suddenly they feel giddy. Are we allowed to try them on? Giddy literally means possessed by a god, and when they slide their arms into the silky material it’s hard to tell if the feeling they have is excitement or anxiety. Or confusion. Or all three. Later, the talkative one will get famous for singing songs in French with a Frenchman, Serge Gainsbourg, but now the younger version of who she’s going to become is still learning the ropes. That’s what they call the rules of the game, and in 1966 people talked about changing the rules, about shedding inhibitions, which is why she unzips her brightly printed dress, letting it fall to the floor, letting her half-naked body be pulled to the room where she tries to follow his directions, trying to hear what he wants her to do but the music is loud and he seems to want something sexual, for her to be sexual. Orgy, the word, meant something different back then, implying not debauchery but liberation, and self-determination, and during the scene he takes out his camera to capture her, posing her in front of a colorful roll of unfurled paper they used to call seamless, a neutral background that had no context but now she can see what the context is. Power. Who has it, who wants it, and who can you trust with your body. I’ve always felt that my body, being distinct from other bodies, separated me from other people, and protected me. My body is here, and other people have other bodies, in other locations, and the idea that bodies can live together is something I’m still getting used to. That’s why, watching Blow-Up, I identify with the model, Jane Birkin. I see myself, not quite naked, but standing in front of the neutral background and letting myself be photographed, letting myself be told what to do, how to stand, how to be, and later, looking at the photographs, I can see what’s happened to my body. My shoulders. They aren’t completely level. One side is slightly higher than the other, the one holding the bag, and the bag is the same bag I’ve carried my entire life, the one the photographer called diabolical, and although he meant stylistically, it makes me think about what a bag like that can do to a person, and did do, to me.

The screenplay for Blow-Up was written by Edward Bond. He was an English writer for the theatre and years ago, when I was an actor, I played a part in one of his early plays. Saved. It’s about a group of young men, a gang, who end up killing a small child, a baby in a pram. The cause is partly accidental but also, according to Bond, aggression is a natural outcome of an unjust society. Violence is a response to the fact that some people have power and privilege, and some people don’t. His early plays were famously violent. I was living in London when I saw his play Lear. I was staying in Hammersmith, camping out in a derelict factory, and the story is based on Shakespeare, about a king who spends his capital building a wall, what he imagines will be a force for order and goodness. And when it becomes the opposite, he tries to tear it down. But it’s too late. And the tragedy of the play is the question left unanswered. How do you tear down what you’ve painstakingly built? The version I saw was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the night I saw it, when I got back to my hovel by the river, apparently, while I was gone, thieves had come, ransacked my carefully concealed hiding place, stolen my rucksack and my sleeping bag, and I remember the king in the play, mad with grief, talking to his dead daughter. She’d been lost, and now she was dead, killed for fighting injustice. Her body was lying on a long wooden table, center stage, and from where I sat in the audience I couldn’t see the wound they’d made in her belly but I remember the actor playing Lear, like a surgeon, dipping his hands into the middle of her being, into the bowl between her ribcage and her pubic bone, and although it took a few days, that image eventually lodged itself in my body. Since I didn’t have a place to stay I spent my time wandering London, stopping at bookstores, and in one of them I found a copy of the text of the play. It was a blue paperback with a photo of Bond on the back cover. I read the play, then read his introduction to the play, then I found his essays about his other plays, and about writing, and socialism, and he seemed to be someone who felt the effects of injustice, who saw how power deforms our social interactions, turns them violent, and instead of running away he pointed it out to the rest of us. My tendency was to turn away, to run from what I didn’t like, whatever felt uncomfortable or dangerous, and he seemed to say that running away is fine, if that’s what you want, but it isn’t necessary. When you are frighted of the dark you do not make it go away by shutting your eyes. In his writing about theater, Bond often used the word rational like someone else might use the word fair or just or common sense. It’s commonsensical to open our eyes and see that we don’t have to hurt each other. That’s what I took him to mean, and what I wanted to ask him wasn’t rhetorical. I really wanted to know. How do you acknowledge a corrupted history and still have pity on the people who carry that history in our bodies?

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John Haskell’s books include I Am Not Jackson Pollock,  American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, and The Complete Ballet. He has written plays, catalogue essays, dance reviews, food histories, and film criticism. Fiction and nonfiction pieces have appeared in variety of publications, including BOMB and A Public Space, magazines where he is a contributing editor. Haskell has performed his work on stage, and on radio shows like The Next Big Thing and Studio 360. He has been awarded fellowships in Europe and America, received NYFA grants, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and has taught in Los Angeles, New York and Leipzig. For more about him hit up his website.