The Journal of the Hydra Book Club Vol.3 Sublime
Earth rent from its foundations! Tartarus itself laid bare!
The whole world torn asunder and turned upside down!
Why, my dear friend, this is a perfect hurly-burly, in which the whole universe, heaven and hell, mortals and immortals, share the conflict and the peril.
Longinus, On the Sublime
Just about everything seems existential lately - an election, a trip back to the USA, the weather. I often feel insane. I’ve always read a lot of horoscopes, and have claimed, stupidly, that astrology is one of my favorite “literary genres”. These days, I actually believe the horoscopes, and I receive signs from the “universe” everywhere. I had lunch the other day in a Greek restaurant on the Upper West Side with a nervous friend who rambled about the planets and transits especially one whose configuration last happened during the American Revolution. I drank two ouzos and left to Newark Airport - the most dangerous airport in America now - and flew to Poland.
We had been in the United States for my father’s 80th birthday party and to buy books for the upcoming Hydra Book Club. While at my parent’s house, Filip and I pieced together the final version of the new issue of the Journal of the Hydra Book Club - and sent it to print.
In a second hand bookshop deep in the Philadelphia suburbs, I found two copies of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Fires – nine monologues by characters of classical literature and myth – Phaedra, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Antigone, Patroclus, Lena, Mary Magdalene, Phaedo, and Sappho. Read it. I’ll have it in the Book Club in September – or order it from your local book dealer.
I read it, while lightly buzzed from a melon flavored marijuana gummy, and in the final chapter we meet Sappho, who appears as a suicidal trapeze artist.
With one pull, she brings herself to the last support her will to die will allow: the trapeze bar swinging in mid-air transforms this creature, tired of being only half woman, into a bird; she glides, sea gull of her own abyss, hanging by one foot, under the gaze of a public which does not believe in tragedy.
The final story in the new issue of the Journal is Ringmaster, by the artist Iris Bernblum. In it, a woman pleads, “take me to the circus” and is thrust into a performance involving an elephant, and a trapeze.
A bar descends from the ceiling, I grab hold. My weight pulls down, I feel a cracking in my armpits, I start to spin, I can’t see, it’s very, very hot. I’m flying. Someone takes hold of my ankles, I’m upside down.
(Image from Iris Bernblum, Ringmaster, 2025)
Also in this issue, a sea gull soars over a drowned planet emptied of humans - the tops of sky scrapers like buoys between icebergs and crowned with aurora borealis in the artist Alice Bucknell’s piece Earthseed 2150. (A nice Octavia Butler reference – and I see the same sea gull of trapeze-Sappho) The eloquent sea gull narrates as she flies.
The water didn’t stop rising after they left. Cities were swallowed tenderly. Iconic architecture bobbed up, jetsam in a cosmic toy bath. No sign of life, yet.
(Image Alice Bucknell, from Earthseed 2150, single channel HD film, 2021)
Last summer, I met Josh Williamson at the Americano bar in Hydra. An instant of perfect connection, an offering of drinks, and a new friendship happened before I learned he was a brilliant cosmologist specializing in dark matter distribution and galaxy formation. He guides us into a blob of dark matter, where the musician and poet Nancy Whang (LCD Soundsystem) also leave us, in a vantablack-dense emptiness.
(Simulation of dark matter clusters by Josh Williamson)
The Virgin Mary suddenly appears out of nowhere. What does this mean? Amanda Michalopoulou’s narrator consults the I Ching, and discovers a visitation is the “deepest level of existential misfortune” yet she finds a friend and companion.
Staring into the void. Who looks back?
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s gazing ball is a portal. Originally from 13th century Venice, these gazing spheres now seem kitch like a garden gnome, and mezmerizing and gravitational as a blob of dark matter gluing galazies together.
The first known writing on the subject of the Sublime, is a work of literary criticism from the 1st Century AD. A Greek literary critic, referred to as Longinus or pseudo-Longinus, wrote “On the Sublime” in which reference is made to Homer, Sappho, and even the Book of Genesis. He defines the sublime through example of exalted language - language itself which provokes astonishment, as well as descriptions of astonishing events.
Our friend Liya Kebede speaks to author Sulaiman Addonia whose most recent novel, The Seers, a single electrified paragraph, opens with the most astonishing line of all,
My mother gave birth to me in Keren, but I rebirthed myself in London that spring night as I topped Bina-Balozi on a bench in Fitzroy Square.
A sentence alone can leave us in awe. This is the third edition of the Journal - just out of the printer, and its 204 pages are ready to be devoured by our readers and devotees. For this new issue, Filip and I have invited a diverse group of artists, writers, readers, philosophers, and scientists to encounter the Sublime.
Yes our Sublime is astonishing, vast, boundless, tremendous, and thundering, but also obscure, empty and silent. It is internal as much as external. It is Greek, Mediterranean, Albanian, Polish, American, Icelandic, and intergalactic.
It is fiction, poetry, essay, and image from Sulaiman Addonia, Joseph Akel, Dimitrios Antonitsis, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Andrea Applebee, Iris Bernblum, Alice Bucknell, Nikos Erinakis, Taras Gembik, Liya Kebede, Kateryna Lysovenko, Amanda Michalopoulou, Nick Millhiser, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Eva Papamargariti, Grzegorz Polański, Christoph Ransmayr, Margo Rejmer, Szymon Rogiński, Giles Round, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Desi Santiago, Eleni Sikelianos, George Skordaras, Dr Michel Tsamados, Joshua Williamson, and Nancy Whang.
With a cover image from the UFO series by the artist Szymon Rogiński.
On sale 19 June.
In Greece? Join us for the launch events:
19 June at Hyper Hypo, Athens 8pm - with a performance/reading by Nikos Erinakis, Amanda Michalopoulou, and Melia Kreiling
22 and 23 June at Old Carpet Factory, Hydra, 6-9pm - with Hydra books and zines (22nd), and the launch of Hela press and a reading by poet Taras Gembik (23rd)