I attended a reading for the launch of a new edition of Astra Magazine in McNally Jackson Seaport. Astra is an international, biannual magazine of literature that features everything from prose, poetry, comics, and cultural criticism. As of right now, there are only two issues, and each issue has an overarching theme to unite all the contributors. The first edition was themed ‘ecstasy,’ and the newest edition is themed ‘filth.’ The attendees were not unified in gender or age; I mean, I found a seat next to a native-Irish man in his late 60’s. Our vastly different backgrounds didn’t matter in that room, as we were all going to spend the next hour communally contemplating our experiences of guilt, shame, and filth.
As an English major, I have always been fascinated by the power of language and word choice. As I was waiting for the event to start, I spent some time thinking about how apparent synonyms can have different connotations. Why did they choose the word ‘filth’ rather than ‘dirty’ or ‘nasty?’ I think dirty tends to be used to describe the objective condition of something, whereas filth is more closely associated with moral implications. Many of the contributors to this edition played with this idea of filth being tied to shame, secrecy, and sexuality. It featured many queer and minority writers who are bound by the experience of feeling that their very existence is morally wrong.
I was drawn to this event because Elif Bautman, author of The Idiot (a favorite book of mine), was one of the speakers. I had the opportunity to meet her and get my copy of the book signed. Her piece was a critical analysis of the character “Pig-Pen” from Peanuts. She not only analyzed how his character represented the social climates of the United States from the 1950s-1990s, but also references theories of Carl Jung and Fyodor Dostoevsky to examine the duality of man his character embodies. I loved this piece so much because it reminded me what I love about contemporary journalism: the ability to shamelessly over-analyze a seemingly frivolous topic. Similarly, I love the freedom in essay writing, as the only thing that defines a ‘good claim’ is the ability to defend it. In other words, say whatever you want (within reason) so long as you can back it up.
My favorite reading was an excerpt from Maggie Millner’s forthcoming book, Couplets. Couplets is a literary innovation by my definition, as it is a lesbian love story composed of a series of poems. It follows a female narrator in an exclusive, straight relationship as she abandons her stable life for a polyamorous romance with an enigmatic woman. The poetic structure of the book creates fantastic imagery and truly transports readers into the plot. I love Millner for her creativity and wit in creating this story, but also hate her for now making me wait until February to find out how the story unfolds.
The final speaker, Brontez Purnell, assured that any audience member who may have been ready to call it a night would suddenly be glued to their chair. His story “Community Work” opens with the line, “I am rolling around naked on a Chinese rug from, like, the late 1800’s,” and only gets progressively worse (and by worse, I mean so much better). He is a queer author who manages to balance shedding light on queer issues while being incredibly hilarious. I appreciated his ability to do this because I’m tired of so much LGBTQA+ media being violent or depressing. It is so refreshing to hear someone simultaneously acknowledge the hardships of the gay experience, as well as the sense of community and joy that unites it.
The indulgence of taboos and unapologetic obscenity from both the speakers, and the magazine itself, broke down any barriers between strangers of the audience. Whether it was a habit of biting nails, or an intrinsic part of one’s existence, we were all bound by our feelings of filth. For that brief time, we were not ashamed of these parts of ourselves, but rather retaliated through our celebration of them. After all, the mission statement of Astra is to connect authors and readers from all around the world. Their themed issues, like ecstasy and filth, remind us that the fundamental parts of the human experience are universal, which can be easily forgotten in our world of hyper-individualism. Though you can still access the issue online, I think the physical print serves as an emblem of this unification. It acts as a time capsule, as physical evidence of overlap between people divided in most other regards. To me, that is what makes literature such a powerful tool in fostering community. No matter how separated readers are geographically, we can all meet in the escapist worlds that literature transports us to.