From the Editor…

The second issue of Socrates on the Beach accrued in a way that made me smile at the luck of the draw. “If you build it, they will come” goes the funny mantra from a too-sentimental baseball film of my youth, but pop culture can contain truth as well. If there is a theme at work here, it is that of looking back to help one find where one is going—building onto world letters through genuflections that can result in renaissance.

The essays demonstrate this theme most noticeably, as subjects often honored make appearances. In an epic essay, J. M. Tyree reads W. G. Sebald through Mark Fisher and then finds light and dark in Fisher (with some Brian Eno mixed in), via his own peregrinations in Dunwich, the scene of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Going further back, there is Rebecca Ariel Porte’s “A Late Quartet (for Henry James),” a wondrous, rhizomatic work burrowing into the Master’s portrayals of consciousness in The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl. Matthew Spencer enlivens the distant world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in a powerful essay looking at Goethe, Kleist, and Caspar David Friedrich, as well as at the geology and oceanography of the periods. Finally, Patrick Farmer’s “A Tinnital Imagination,” a Barthesian fugue of sorts, takes one deep into the ear to explore the mysteries of the affliction.

The fiction side of the issue is a glittering mélange of daring voices and perspectives that calls to mind the riches of the twentieth century from Gertrude Stein to Thomas Bernhard and Donald Barthelme. Steve Barbaro’s dark, darkly funny, and lyrical “Celestial Camo” returns to the early years of the Gulf War, both overseas and in country. Vi Khi Nao’s three exuberant stories bristle with characters askew in a world far bluer than ours. Similarly, Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s “(Not) Roberto Bolaño” charts its own path into the underbelly of the U.S., with a syntactical verve, teaching one how to read it as it proceeds. Jacqueline Feldman’s deft and witty “Milena,” a foreigner’s account of the eponymous woman she meets in Paris, is one of those ghostly short stories that leave a remarkable impression. Finally, Lance Olsen’s exquisite “Absolute Away,” a kaleidoscopic narrative verging on novella length, takes one into the nightmare of Nazi Germany, where a small girl bites the lip of Hermann Göring.

I have left untouched certain spellings and patterns of punctuation from across the ocean.

Thank you for visiting. I hope you will enjoy these works.

Greg Gerke