Creative Writing by Nika in Chicago

She wouldn’t wear that lipstick again. The two of them smiled when the doctor

entered the room. I was wearing denim; she was in scrubs. I was old enough to have

something wrong with me. She was young enough to be single. We didn’t touch.

This is a work of fiction. It is accurate to everything but the reality of what I know about the

author’s experience with another woman. That means it is not really a lie, in the sense that it is

not fair to the word though not, by my critical judgement, to the doctor I was remembering to

compose my scene.

He loved her, he did. He suggested he pined for her when she wasn’t around. She

couldn’t know what he thought of everything that was wrong with her, though she

knew she thought of those things. How it could be possible for them to have this

conversation, without including it was apparent.

This is a piece of science fiction. It imagines more than I know, but proposes to draw towards

that which is viable. It is far less implying than the first, which suggests the author harbors an

interest in women. But the second shows a female sexuality, which is more focused on latent

differences than manifest signs. How do other works of science fiction account for their role in

the world?

The first piece of literature called sci-fi is said to be Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was capable of

imagining a world far more inventive without violating real fidelity. I read it as a story of her

husband’s narcissism, refracted through the expectations of the market. Her contemporary

competitors for my interest as a reader include Adelle Waldman, whose Love Affairs of

Nathaniel P ended up in my house. To say it’s a print version of a blog is not flattering, I

suppose. Nonetheless it, like Frankenstein, attends to white male narcissism quite well. Whether

it will satisfy the market as Mary Shelley did is for our children to know.

Why Ms. Shelley succeeded! In overtaking her pedigreed spouse, who went to Cambridge and

studied medicine, with her own pedigree as the daughter of the literary gatekeeper William

Godwin and his suicidal wife Mary Wollstonecraft, in a sexist world; Percy died within a decade

of the publication of the book they market from attempted colonialism. How is the world sexist,

literally or literarily? That was the question of the novel.

Why do we think to distinguish between questions and claims by more than punctuation? A work

of scientific literature asserts the false dichotomy by proposing to substantiate a thesis. The

social sciences conclude with the scope, which posits the unknown. Science is not usually

publishable when its work falsifies the opening claim. Fiction doesn’t even want to show its hand

in the sphere of public knowledge, except by its packaging. A short story in the New Yorker is

excellence in its execution, but otherwise false speech. How doesn’t that make its publication a

conflict of interest? Scientific literature says more too poorly to circulate as well as ‘artistic’

literature.

I studied creative writing in high school and college, and then gave it up to study how to know.

The number of competing claims in spheres as ‘soft’ as nutrition or as ‘hard’ as physics made me

crazy. The diagnosis of hysteria barely differs from schizophrenia but has been discarded by

whose clinicians for what sexist connotations? During the pandemic, women in detention centers

reportedly woke up to hysterectomies performed without their knowledge. I am a writer sitting in

her bedroom alone thinking she can speak of how she has been detained.

You know how people say they don’t trust politicians? I just don’t trust what they say, or any

writer. We call for the same work as our critique. Is there anything I’m not saying? His name is

Mark, and he’s the one I’m supposed to name. The doctors say I’m unwell, but he wouldn’t now.

What we don’t know is whether I will be okay to be a mother, by a body that took too many hits

from youth. For you, I still believe I need him to show me where the numbers in the manuals

make “optimism” for me as their partner in an artist’s mouth. The idea that our species isn’t

capable of spontaneous reproduction belongs to the nineteenth century, with Mary Shelley’s

book.

Music and movement harmonize the visual and literary arts. The technical transformation of the

field of art through technological improvement produces the sociological mediation of

entertainment by scientific knowledge. Why would we diversify the visual field to polarize naïve

abstraction in painting to the brutal gaze of the Renaissance portrait artist behind the camera?

The book barely registers the paradiagetic condition, despite making formal innovations to

preserve the poetic stylings of print rather than the oral stutters of live dialogue. The objective

can seem to be control over language, for the machine.

What that shows may be evident to others. Though language can be seen to ‘change’ by the

introduction of, for instance, new words in the dictionary, it is maintained to be a homogenous

system by a population that uses it to communicate. Artificial intelligence adapts to our linguistic

sensemaking by predictive calculation, but thus it cannot meet us in the coded system of

interaction we have developed to eliminate mediation called the ‘love.’ The fact that this makes

the dominated subject loneliest does not obviate the marginality of technology designed to fail

the terms of friendship, except by an understanding that it belongs to our culture by the same

degree as a popular contemporary romance.

The new technologies of the personal computer or the cell phone can be said to improve on the

paltry performance of the book in edifying its audience. Moral concern of the deleterious effects

of novel reading have been documented, both by recent literature and the corpus of fiction*. How

that nexus of bile accompanies our transition to computation apart from the availability of

pornography, which is not responsible to the history of aesthetics, is by the rather dubious

stickiness of software elements. The binder, the folder and the window reproduce the screen as a

‘house of fiction.’ The industry of erotic moving images merely presses the boundaries of

speakable psychosis by the concept formerly known as art. I have seen clothed advertising with

models who could not be teenagers by the age of majority overlaying nude videos of produced

sex between adults. The attention to obscenity in the twentieth century is my point of contact

with the rather scary makers of this art.

It had been that she thought she was a genius, but that was Robin Williams. He wanted to die,

she wanted to survive better than Gloria Gaynor but when the doctors wanted her to take her

pills, she said no and nothing got better. Interview with a Vampire was my dream be, but

whether its text made me for the young blonde or the aged brunette whose sex was unpreserved

as tousled hair and rumpled face is whose nightmare? If only I could be a vampire like you, and

not the human who gives blood to hospitals that say only too late where their peers made

injuries.

We spoke tonight and it was known that we were in the nineteenth century, or back to what we

could have imagined when I was in the apartment alone. I had hoped no one would have to go

because of you and me, and they did, and now I am hoping no one but me can promise to know

that the real I said today could be like another kind of backbend.

The people mentioned in previous paragraphs are unknown, because they only go by she and he,

but where you are. In fact most of the shes are I, but and hes take from one but include the mass.

* Hardy, Thomas. 2008. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Oxford University Press; Littau,

Karin. 2006. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania. Polity. See also Ivan

Bunin’s “Light Breathing.”