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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 following text is the condensed result of over ninety hours of dialogue with Ricardo Melogno, recorded between November 2014 and December 2015 The conversations were much longer and more disparate, and the topics were covered with less continuity and greater chaos than in the current text My edits respect the words of the interviewee while compressing, grouping and organising them chronologically and thematically, with the goal of providing structure to his story I believe I have respected the concepts expounded by Ricardo, but I take full responsibility for any differences or mistakes arising from the editing process C B   TURNING TOWARDS THE DARKNESS   ‘I was told that someone saw you levitate’   [Melogno furrows his brow, smiles with amusement]   ‘Who?’   ‘Someone who knew you from Unit 20 and was convicted again They brought him here and when he saw you, he asked to be kept as far away from you as possible He said that you were evil, and that he had seen you levitate’   ‘Oh, I know who that is, ha ha Well, you see, that kid’s real impressionable Among other major issues he has   Here’s the thing with me Inside the prison, things pass from mouth to mouth and they start adding up Over the years it’s sort of snowballed Even now, when they send in the search parties (they’re not guards from here, but from the ‘regular’ prison, and they come every two or three months) they find the shrine in my cell with all the offerings and the candles, they say: ‘Old man, what are you into here? What’s all this strange stuff?’ But these guys are more modern these days, they ask more out of curiosity, not out of fear   [On his left arm he has a tattoo with three symbols on top of each other: at the top is a 666, in the middle an inverted crucifix and on the bottom a reversed swastika The line of symbols is flanked by two snakes writhing rampantly from left to right]   ‘Why the reversed swastika?’   ‘The regular swastika, the one used by the Nazis, represents turning towards the sun, towards the light So I got mine

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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Art

July 2015

Michaël Borremans

Ben Eastham

Art

July 2015

Michaël Borremans is among the most important painters at work in the world today. His practice combines a lifetime’s...

poetry

January 2015

Why I'm Not a Great Lover

Clemens J. Setz

TR. Ross Benjamin

poetry

January 2015

Why I’m Not A Great Lover   The circumstances. The zeitgeist.   The inner uncertainty. The lack of belief...

poetry

February 2013

Social Contract

Les Kay

poetry

February 2013

Formally, I and the undersigned— What? Use, like Mama said, your imagination if you still have one where scripts...

 

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