Liminality

Skeletal humour between binaries


Skeletal humour
between binaries:
forfeiting the funny in Svetlana Alexievich’s Boys in Zinc

Emily Upson

Eva van Roekel, an anthropologist working within Latin America, spent several years in post-dictatorship Argentina. She examined how humour revealed “internalised ambiguities”, in “complex everyday moral confusions and moral uncertainties”.¹ This analysis was a steep departure from the often perfunctory assessment that humour entrenched social groups as certainties, rather than sensitively navigating social uncertainties. I want to take this perspective and apply it to Svetlana Alexievich’s text, Boys in Zinc, which is a collection […]

Skeletal humour between binaries2020-06-08T06:55:07+00:00

Mirage


Mirage

Fiona Haborak

These days, he’s a corpse. An automaton crookedly shambling down the migraine-inducing neon strip, wrinkled suit wet from stale liquor and sweat. He squints while trying to bring her lazy image into focus. An out-of-focus apparition makes him lose track of time. The face of his watch suffers a splinter from his most recent bender. 

‘Lo and behold, there she is, amongst the sea of tourists and one-day marriage lovebirds, with that handsome magazine man by her stick-thin side. Mafia, he suspects, by the way he’s packing, […]

Mirage2020-06-08T06:55:14+00:00
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