Editor's Note

Bombay Gin 38.1, 2012
Threshold: Tenuous Proposition Of

          As has been the case for the last couple of years, this latest issue of Bombay Gin is thematic; yet this time around, that theme—“lunatic,” as the printer Wesley Tanner suggests in his interview—offers, posits, positions itself contingently. Threshold: a location with the tenuousness of proposition. I am compelled to poach Bombay Gin Associate Editor Kristen Park’s definition of threshold as communicated through an email exchange earlier this fall:

It is the space of trans—the border realized in cross—the site of exchange OR the wall, the ceiling, the carrying capacity of breath OR the measure of tolerance/endurance/stamina in the dissolution of tolerance/endurance/stamina OR the place to push that pushes back OR the entry or departure into a piece.moment.life OR the architecture that holds space between two faces—an arch, a lake, foot of the bed OR the "pleasure of the text" OR maps of the liminal OR the compositional unit a work [word, sentence, paragraph, piece].

          We chose to leave the threshold various, unstructured by classification or catalog but subject to its natural patterns: four interviews—all conducted during the 2011 Summer Writing Program between Bombay Gin associate editors from the Jack Kerouac School and SWP writing and printing faculty—anchor the content. We have chosen to pair creative work—textual and visual—with the interviews and then to fill the matrix with the clay of individual pieces by some of our favorite writers. The section concludes with three poems and a lecture presented by Ana Bozicevic at the 2011 SWP and eventually available in the Naropa Audio Archives. Then, as has been our custom, we end the issue with six book reviews, this time written exclusively by former and current JKS students.

          It has been a pleasure to observe patterns form as if they operated within our design. That is, you will notice that some of these writers respond deliberately to the question of threshold, while for others the threshold is accidental—a silly word, “accidental,” because by tracking the presence of something, one, of course, engenders it. Yet, these patterns strongly suggest a shared self-consciousness and anxiety about our unique moment in history, as if this moment is itself a threshold.

          For instance, Colin Fraser, Wesley Tanner, Ronaldo Wilson, and Thurston Moore touch on the paradoxical qualities of threshold’s liminality. On one hand, the threshold is a “fracture,” to use Wilson’s term, and, on the other hand, that space is glutted with messages; these standards of modern life so saturate the fracture that it is difficult to measure the spatial qualities of threshold. Further, both Moore and Tanner connect the ephemeral nature of information to the archive, the tactility of the material, and the hopeful resurgence of the micro.

          Similarly, Bhanu Kapil, Lily Hoang, DJ Spooky, and Ana Bozicevic allude to threshold as a “limbo in identity,” as DJ Spooky would have it—appropriately figured in Antarctica, one of the most enigmatic yet tenuous geographies on a warming planet—and the “in-between place of diaspora” during “the age of the interweb,” according to Bozicevic. Bhanu Kapil’s Ban suggests that dislocation finds its seat in the psyche, then in the sentence, while Dodie Bellamy’s “When the Sick Rule the World” gives us the body so radically ill and at odds with the environment, it is difficult to know the inside from the assaulting outside. Syntax is also a kind of threshold, an end and beginning, a deference of meaning menaced in Bellamy’s “Sick,” discussed in Heather Goodrich’s opening interview with Vanessa Place, and jettisoned in Erin Morrill’s term “exit velocity.”

          While these images draw out the spatial and temporal qualities of threshold—a place to move through—there are also pieces that present threshold as a space for pause. We may understand threshold as khora, a space for being. Vanessa Place, for instance, posits gates that lead nowhere, that, in the promise of damnation or glory, captivate us. I am thinking here also of printer Lara Durback’s image of Jena Osman’s Persona Ficta; in this image, lines from the poem seem captured mid-thatch, forming corporeal (not corporate) tissue. Finally, Christina Mengert’s meditations propose how the meditative state, the other space of being, elicits the matchless knowledge of the soul.

          I am reminded of eighteenth-century buildings that, for their lack of corridors, require one to cross many thresholds to traverse the length of a building. Please enter then through this threshold to explore the work of some of our most innovative writers. I invite you to read straight through, so that as you cross one threshold, you simultaneously enter the space of an other.