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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

The contemporary hunter-gatherer does not hunt to survive Rather, he (neo-survivalism is a predominantly heterosexual male pursuit) forages for something else, something experientially ‘Other’ It’s a phenomenon popularised by the rise of survivalist entertainment – reality TV, docudramas, dedicated YouTube channels, and open-world online survival games – in which contestants must prevail on a desert island, or in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with only a sharp knife and a bit of twine for tools His efforts are equal parts sportsmanship and showmanship, a combination that manifests in a compulsion to record and make public his triumphs of resourcefulness Actively prepared for emergencies, he is ready to drink his own urine (a feat that proved too great for guest star Barack Obama during his appearance on Running Wild with Bear Grylls), for the collapse of government, economy, and power grids, for threats that are, as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, both ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’   In her video work Mouth (2017), currently on show at Arcadia Missa, New York-based Croatian artist Maja Čule depicts the contemporary hunter-gatherer – a group of urban survivalists somewhere near New York City, who choose to hunt for their food rather than take the more convenient option of buying it from a shop The video’s protagonists are performers instructed by Čule – some of whom identify as survivalists themselves Blurring in and out of fiction, documentary and narrative film, Mouth alternates between two locations: the grim, neon-lit interior of an animal sanctuary, where we watch a woman named Senka tend to the animals under her care, and a forest, in which we follow a group of men roaming about in the dark, armed with sticks and pocket-sized torches   While Senka is busy at work, the men flex and posture for the camera, leaning excessively on walking staffs made of whittled tree branches, or using them to prod at the foliage One gazes at his feet as he disturbs murky pond water with his boots, another twirls the stem of a leaf between his index and thumb, but they do nothing of note The closest these ‘hunter-gathers’

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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Essay

Issue No. 18

The Disquieting Muses

Leslie Jamison

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   In Within Heaven and Hell (1996), Ellen Cantor’s voice-over tells the story of a doomed love affair...

fiction

September 2012

Sarah Palin Night

Agustín Fernández Mallo

TR. Michael McDevitt

fiction

September 2012

It was a Sunday afternoon, siesta time: my phone buzzed in my pocket. ‘Is this Agustín Fernández Mallo?’ ‘Yes,...

poetry

Issue No. 18

Two New Poems

Dorothea Lasky

poetry

Issue No. 18

Do You Want To Dip The Rat   Do you want to dip the rat Completely in oil  ...

 

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