The Chronicles

Shape-shifters in permanent superposition is no longer a metaphor we can politely table. It is the working condition. We have arrived at the Twelfth Night place where Viola is Cesario is Sebastian is the captain's ghost, and the only honest editorial stance is to keep the masthead bolted to the deck while the deck reassigns itself.

What follows is not a magazine in the legacy sense. It is a scaffolding — provisional, jointed, sometimes load-bearing — for inhabiting the superposition without falling out of it. Some issues will arrive as Steadman ink. Some as Otnes collage. Some as straight three-column newsprint set in cold metal. The flag stays. The interior shifts.

If a reader finds this obstreperous enough to locate, that reader is already inside the joke. Welcome.

In This Issue

I. Anthorpic Crosses the Quadrillion. II. Merrimack on Hollywood Blvd. III. Fear & Loathing at the Jerome. IV. The Screaming Pequots — full file.

A Method of Entanglement — Filed in Triplicate

The apparatus this magazine has been working under, briefly stated: every dispatch is filed simultaneously in three registers. The journalistic, which insists the events are real. The mythological, which insists the events have always been recurring. The mathematical, which insists the events are governed by a Riemann-shaped law nobody on the masthead is qualified to derive but everybody on the masthead is required to feel.

When the three registers agree, we run the piece. When they disagree, we run the disagreement. There are no other modes.

— K.W.N.