Pullout

The Future Is Here

Clear Cut Press vs. Daylight Hours

by Charles Mudede

The sleeve of Clear Cut Press's sky-blue, Japanese-printed anthology, The Clear Cut Future, has this enigmatic paragraph, which, I presume, is composed by Matthew Stadler, the editor, and Rich Jansen, the manager of the business, which at present is based in a small city near the end of the Columbia River, Astoria, Oregon: "This book is a tool for the future, which is here. You can use it. It has words, pictures, and other information. The book is portable and durable. If you leave the area it will still be useful. There are many other places like this one. The book might help you recognize them. The future has preoccupations and it has trajectories. The book maps these conditions. Men and women, as we know them, will no longer be the same. Your job may become strange. Some possibilities will blossom as others collapse. The language of the future is more beautiful than we know."

If this passage were a person, the part of the day that he/she would be standing in is that which the peasants of ancient Rome described as "inter canem et lupum" (between the dog and the wolf)--the moment when the shepherd cannot determine if the creature at a distance is his trusty dog or a tricky wolf. Can a sentence be more crepuscular than "This book is a tool for the future, which is here"? And what exactly is meant by "Your job may become strange"? But whereas the hours between the dog and the wolf inspired fear in the poor Roman shepherd, The Clear Cut Future inspires desire. And all desire becomes the language of the future.

Charles D'Ambrosio, Stacey Levine, and Matt Briggs are writers from the Pacific Northwest whose new work is to be published by Clear Cut Press and whose past work can always be found not in the middle of a day but at its end, when shadows become people and the sky is a perfect confusion of dying daylight and startled stars.