notresponding
by Brian Oliu
This piece is from a larger project that imagines The Odyssey as a computer virus. I was inspired by how the epic resembles lines in computer code, namely a Microsoft DOS prompt. This section is a “collaboration” with Book IX where Odysseus and his men find themselves in exile on the isle of the Lotus Eaters. The goal of the Lotus Eaters is to delay the men from wanting to return home — they forget all thoughts of homesickness and think only about the moment they are in. I wanted to have this be a parallel with a computer that is not responding after running an antivirus; after all, the antivirus is an eraser, just like the soldiers’ minds are erased with their end goal. The dots are meant to emphasize the time it is taking to process everything — that these thoughts find themselves butting their way into the program that is “hanging.” As a result, what finds its way through are bursts of instances of pauses and distractions — both those of Odysseus & myself. The form is also a nod to Ander Monson’s amazing essay, “I Have Been Thinking About Snow,” in which the distractions/punctuation winds up filling the page, which makes the blocks of text carry that much more weight.
Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of So You Know It’s Me, a series of Tuscaloosa Missed Connections, Level End, a collection of lyric essays about videogame boss battles, and “Leave Luck to Heaven,” an ode to 8-bit Nintendo games.
Originally appeared in the online supplement to the Beyond Category issue 43.2-44.1