TLB6: S. britt, Jana Hunter, + Benjamin Kunkel

We’re going to take some time this week to turn you on to our own Ronnie Scott’s wonderful endeavor, The Lifted Brow. Now on it’s 6th issue, TLB is a “biannual attack journal” featuring original writing, art, and music from all over the world. The new issue is “an atlas of the world, newly observed by Bodies of Water, The Cannanes, Douglas Coupland, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Hannah Marcus and Rick Moody, Sage Francis, Christine Schutt, Christos Tsiolkas, and David Foster Wallace,” which actually barely scratches the surface of describing this edition, when you consider that there are another 120 or so contributors to the book, and another 40-odd musical artists on this issue’s 2 CDs.

The Lifted Brow Vol. 6 is a splendid bricolage of art, music, and writing, so it seems only appopriate to share a little of each with you. Our first entry, featuring S. britt, Jana Hunter, and Benjamin Kunkel, after the jump. Stay tuned, we’ve got more to come as the week progresses…

Csongrád Campfire (Hungary) by S.britt

Gifthorse (Jana Hunter) – “Dark Engineer (Morocco)”

Excerpt from Patagonia
by Benjamin Kunkel

The texture of the glacial wall, from a distance, like a block of hard cheese, though the ice is unearthly blue, colour somehow of the afterlife; a stranded iceberg in the middle of the bay with a look of dark blue molten glass. And now the glacier calves! Ice shears off in a great sudden flake and explodes into the water below with a colossal sound of detonation.

Everyone speaks in a hushed voice, as in museum. There is inevitably a funereal quality to visiting a glacier today. At length in a group of twenty people, after another great flake of ice has plunged into the bay, making for a huge cavity, then a surge of frigid water where it fell, it seems no one is speaking at all. The sound of the calving like a heavy artillery range…

The glacier is like an enormous avalanche in freeze-frame; the impression of tremendous violence carried out with voluptuous slowness—something like the passage of time in general.

The Lifted Brow Vol. 6 can be ordered here for $32USD, shipping included.

- Ryan Catbird