There is another Jaslyn Law out there. She is from Singapore and she has a PhD in nanotechnology. When I first discovered her existence, she was 22 years old—older than I was. That was the greatest insult of all: she had been living with my name for longer than I had.

I know this all because I Google myself, of course. (And I must Google myself a lot, since I am the first Jaslyn Law that the search engine’s autocomplete algorithm suggests.) Before Google, I was the only Jaslyn Law in the world. I was the only Jaslyn in the world: my parents made up my name, after all, hybridizing Jocelyn and Jasmine just before the filing deadline of my birth certificate. Throughout my childhood, I attempted to convince people that they hadn’t, in fact, known other Jaslyns, as they claimed. I was the only one; they were mistaken. (I am an only child.)

But humans are mostly the same—over 99% genetically identical. And surely, within this magazine, Patrick Freeman is saying with elephants exactly what Mattias Lanas is saying with orchids and what Katherine Chen says with seals. Katie Wu is not the first to write about the death of a parent; Roseann Cima is not the first to have journaled from Buenos Aires. Frank Rodriguez may be the first person to write about Ray Bradbury in space with animatronic sex dolls, but I’m sure there’s universality in his story, so he’s not really an exception to this list.

The pieces in this issue are carefully curated, though—they stood out to our editorial staff. We have seen conservation photography before, published stories on death and sex too many times, read epistolary chronicles, but we had not seen these works before.

It’s no wonder so many artists and writers are eccentrics: they are charged with the maddening job of producing work that highlights, at once, both singularity and universality.

But though I tell myself that embracing this contradiction is my responsibility both here and more broadly, I can’t help it: it still pisses me off that there is another person running around with my name, even if we are experiencing the same, shared human experience in two totally remote, diverging lives.

–Jaslyn Law

Jaslyn Law^[1] and the editors of Leland Quarterly
Stanford, CA

Abstract
The technology of remote sensing—the imaging of the Earth’s surface from space—is at the cutting edge, producing data so vast and detailed as to regularly crash computers used for analysis. In this study, we compared (1) the evolution of remote sensing technology and (2) the proliferation of the nebulous, impossible to categorize prose poem/short fiction/flash fiction/prosetry/postcard fiction/short short. Our aim was to understand the dual processes of innovation and interpretation in creating the foundations for a new genre or paradigm in literature. We observed that the imagery obtained from satellites is often so high-resolution that scientists must reduce image quality to the lesser, more digestible sizes of old in order to have a dataset that does not overwhelm existing analysis methods. Similarly, writers of literature continue to push the limits of genre, producing works that confound traditional conceptual frameworks. Interpretation lags: the satellite technician can provide no helpful hints to the scientists attempting to understand the data he produces; the author often has no input on whether the editor should file a short piece under Poetry or Fiction.^[2] This study concluded that true groundbreaking—the establishment of a new school for interpreting a new genre—is the dual role of the writer and his reader and/or editor. Advances in interpretation follow innovation in order to trailblaze new disciplines in science or literature—often leaving the geographer and the editor running to keep pace. Still, though, the scientist can appreciate the future applications of stunning new satellite images. Likewise, the editors’ obligation is to publish that confounding Short Ungenred Piece, just because they like it, even though they have no idea why they do.

________________________________________

[1] Undergraduate at Stanford University, Earth Systems & Creative Writing Departments
[2] When questioned on whether his short piece “Of Late” was more fiction or poetry,
contributor S. Winger responded frankly: “No idea. It could also be non-fiction.”^[3]
[3] Which was to say, effectively: “The issue of categorizing my work is really your problem.”

But my favorite was this: when an archaeologist digs up a nail, he pulls it out, puts it in a bag with a label, and pounds his own, twenty-first century nail in its place, to mark the spot with a numbered tag.

Already, by the end of our month on site, the dirt-mound on the side of the trench was overgrown with shoots of grass and yellow daisies. I can only imagine, then, that two millenia from now, back over in the pit, the tag will disintegrate, the nail will rust over, and some new Californian college student looking for an experience abroad in an untried discipline will hit it with his trowel. He will take it out, clean it, bag it, and hammer in his own nail. This is how the study of archaeology is perpetuated, for ever and ever.

Artists are not so different, though. The nails of Roman culture, after all, have been turned up, forgotten, and replaced many times before. Just as, before Rome’s rise, the Greek Classical period had its Hellenistic succession, The Renaissance gave way to Mannerism, Poussin to Rococo, and David to the Romantics. The new Romes may not reign as long, but they continue to rise.

Or, at least, they did until recently. The 1900s had their Terza Roma claimed by Mussolini, and ever since, we’ve been a little squeamish about proclaiming a fourth. Digging for nails is a dirty, difficult job: how much easier, instead—said the abstract expressionists, said the conceptualists, said postmodernism all in one—to stand on the side of the trench, snickering at the very idea of looking for nails in the first place. Much better, no doubt, to build without nails at all. To escape the widening gyre of Rome’s rise and fall for good.

But without nails, things fall apart. We visit, now, art galleries of Individual Talent without Tradition, museums where movements and manifestos have been reduced to Me. And so, nothing is built but egos.

Archaeologists look for nails because nails hold together doors, and doors hold together buildings, and buildings hold together cities, and cities hold together republics. The artist who digs for nails to put new ones in their place is an artist who cares about a continued correspondence in his own republic, the republic of letters. Nails are the language of those letters: artistic forms, poetic meters, portraits, statues, myths, virtues, histories. The letters themselves are doors, buildings, and cities: conduits and forums of thought. You can still see the cornerstones of these buildings in the Binchester vicus, and the tags we left are still legible under sprouting weeds. There’s time, yet, to climb the mound of dirt already unearthed and to look out at the sky for eagles.

Love is why I refuse to do the laundry
or
If you love me, you should wear chinos.

It’s painting to avoid a conversation.

Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back
In the fridge, I might write an ode to grocery stores

Fluorescent promises of ten steaks for the price of one.

And in another book another wife has written
About her husband who refuses to take off
His madras shorts and replace the milk.

But she never uses the words husband, or shorts, or milk.
Hers is a page about anteaters, yet it’s clear
She and I suffer the same.

You really should go to the store.

I ask the majors of Economics, at what point do I go to the bank, take out all of my money, and put it under the mattress?  At what point, do I worry about sustenance?  Post-Graduation existence seems increasingly theoretical.  I’m not sure what future I’m looking for anymore.  My friend has been working for over a year in Antarctica, and I ask him: Do you Google truth?  He laughs, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by authenticity, hysterical Googling truth naked…”

When will we explore the mosaics in the abandoned subway stations?  When will we harvest for the New Year?  I frantically sculpt orange rinds in the Nevada desert, weld vertebrae in part-time studios, stash familial tintypes and polaroids in top-shelf first editions.  Clinging to the potential and the unease, the hazy and the untranslated, between the cellular walls and beyond the event horizon, I rummage the present.  I’ve never been mechanically inclined; my fingers tremble from cog to manual.  I follow the written word with instinctual faith.

On a road trip through New Orleans, we listen to the funk of enduring generations and discuss the supersymmetry of elementary particles. For the journey, I wrap my laptop in burlap.  I wear my sheepskin boots in preparation. Packing wool and propane, I find myself nourished by the panic, when what I really want is itemized on a to-do list: microscope, four-pound lobster, Pyrex, Alaska, and a mercury fountain.  “You can only put your pants on one leg at a time,” my father says, and to that, we toast.  From pronoun to preposition, from interjection to interrobang, we page through the appendixes, attentively.

After leaving Harry, Myra hears the strains of a Christmas carol sung from inside the ward: Hark the herald angels sing / Glory to the newborn king… Myra is wretched with sobs, alone in hoping for Harry’s recovery, a better love, and probably, a child. But while Myra has been visiting with Harry her friends have found a nearby roadhouse; they pick her up from the hospital drunk and thrilled to be alive. Myra wipes away her tears, and letting Jack set his hand on her breast and then between her legs, she implores her lover, “darling, let’s go right home.”

I mean to talk about anonymity, which can been euphemized and romanticized until a picture springs into our minds of a joyous and contemplative fellow, arrayed in a snappy argyle sweater, wandering the streets of Paris, wondering at the beauty of the world. (This is me most days.) But what is anonymity except temporary peaceful loneliness? The pleasure of being nameless in a crowd is the awful, sneaking pleasure we feel at the end of volunteering at a tough school, or worse, at a poor man’s funeral. The voice in our heads that says, “This is not me. I am better than this. This fate will escape me.” It is fine and well to be anonymous so long as we can go home to a place where we are loved and where our name is not unknown. Where we can give voice to our dreams and aspirations, or better, where they are anticipated.

There are easy cures for loneliness practically at every turn. But like a stubborn tuberculosis, loneliness consumes us from within, a nagging ragged breath of despair that can be scrubbed away in a night, but whose stain reappears in the morning. The joy of anonymity is the re-emergence into our comfortable little circles, and though the exercise in loneliness thrills us, we will never completely let out the leash that ties us to our better lives.

–NICK HOY

I am searching for a friend between the ages of two and six.  Idea being that we’d have about the same vocabulary, the same hold on French grammar, and, truth be told, a lot of overlapping interests.  Course they’ve got some of the same social conventions over here that we’ve got over there so I couldn’t just, say, wander over to the park and jump in on a game of marbles.

In other news, I’m older than I was one year ago.  Not to mention that I’ve got an apartment, a couple odd jobs that almost add up to a living, and a vague sense of loneliness that makes me feel very mature.  The whole growing up thing is, of course, belied by the fact that Nick and I share a room and that our beds are close enough together that we can do a high-five before turning in for the night.

On weekends, I’ve taken to doing day trips on my own, making brief forays into solitude: hiking Montmartre, getting lost in the throng of an open-air market, reading in parks and cafes.  After a few hours alone, coming home is always something of a let down.  I ride the metro with my chin perched on my palm, eyes an inch above whatever book I’m supposedly reading.  I sit there thoughtlessly and stare out into a forest of calves and ankles: pantyhose, varicose veins, pinstripe slacks and circulation-slowing jeans, pleated skirts and the houghs of knees.

These brief moments of forgetfulness are incredibly peaceful: long exhales of not thinking.  Part of it is, no doubt, the fact that I know no names and no one knows mine.  But what really gets me are those brief moments of weightlessness, as if at some point in the afternoon I’d outrun myself, turned a corner and left behind all my needs and desires, my convictions and neuroses.  I dub these my amoeba moments.  It’s a single-cell feeling, a sense of being in complete harmony with what’s going on around me, a protean feeling that I can be exactly what I want to be because I don’t really want to be anything at all.

Of course, the thing about exhaling is that, sooner or later, you have to breathe back in: bills, family, housekeeping, living. And the thing about being an amoeba is that I’m not.  I’ve, like, evolved, for better or worse, and what I realize is that these moments of forgetfulness are really just moments of nostalgia.  I’m invisible to myself only because I’m everywhere: a beautiful Francophone on the metro is a potential bride to be; a display-window cake is there only for me; a stony general on horseback is my doppelganger in a different time.

It’s like I’m a child, still imagining the world as something that bends to my desires, that grants my every whim, that’s been created for me, to please me and only me.  It’s odd how what sometimes feels like complete resignation is really just another version of wish fulfillment.  Like waking with a start from a dead dreamless sleep and thinking, ‘Hey, that wasn’t so bad,’ and then settling back in, warm and rested, between the covers

–BOB BOREK

Before cutting the umbilical cord that binds us to Leland, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who poured so much effort into the magazine over the last few years, and to wish the best of luck to those who have taken it over.

Running Leland is a lot like flying a kite.  And we spent two years sitting on the beach, taking turns with our thumb on the spool, admiring a kite held aloft by extraordinary talent that was not our own.

–NICK & BOB

I pass hours in the courtyard of my hotel, which has everything I need and could be possibly entertained by in Africa. A wireless internet connection, which they call wi-fi in French, so that it rhymes with leafy or beefy. A bar and a barman, who meets me with a beer at my preferred beer-drinking and wi-fi surfing table, near the hanging vines but not so near that a mosquito could lurk in the greenery and launch a surprise attack on my upper neck. I am terrified of contracting dengue fever, yellow fever, or malaria.

The barman is convinced I neither speak nor understand a word of French, no matter how many times I talk in French to him.

Bonsoir, I say.

Would you like some food tonight?

Oui, le menu, s’il-te-plait.

The fish is good tonight. The chicken is also good.

Je prends le poisson.

You like beer, don’t you, mon ami. And then he laughs in a very Francophone way, which I do not pretend to understand.

But the barman and do I have an understanding, on a superficial level that is the equal of some friendships I know. He jokes at me in poor English, and I rigole back at him in le mauvais français. The Spaniards who descend on the courtyard for several cloudy days in my second week become the subject of both of our jabs: they speak neither French nor English nor anything in-between, and they smoke all day and drink Coca Light, and they tip badly, the barman tells me. Here as everywhere otherness is measured in degrees, even at the extreme margins of the scale, and my otherness is not as other as theirs. There is an old Frenchman, too, whose voice is like a whisper at full-shout, an unpleasant croaked-out thing. He sits for a week on the same barstool front of a little color television that plays French variety shows and basketball at night. When he shouts at the television or the barman I can picture his voice-box in my head: it is gnarled and poisoned and hanging by the slenderest thread to his esophagus. One day the Frenchman is gone, and I ask the barman if he has seen our friend, if he is alive or dead. The barman smiles a wicked smile, perches himself on a barstool, and peers down at me, arms wheeling theatrically.

“I am dead,” he says, rasping and gasping. “Too many cigarettes, too many women, get me a beer.” Then he breaks out in giggles. “A big beer, I said, and cook me an omelet.” The Spaniards look on, smiling and baffled. I clutch at my neck and waggle my tongue out of my mouth like I’m choking. “Je suis mort,” I say. “Au secours. Police. Hôpital. Pompiers. Omelette.” I lay my head on the table. “Je suis mort.” We are both laughing now, he comes over and slaps me hard on the back, I pretend to choke and die again, and we laugh some more. Five minutes later, the barman brings me a fresh beer. “Nothing in Africa you get for free,” he tells me. “Except this time.”

— Nick Hoy and the Editors of Leland