The Workshop of Elvis Bego

Elvis Bego writer fiction essays

[elvisbego]

LATEST PUBLICATIONS

Loosed, Unmoored — The Common, (fiction, 2026)

On the Marvellous Quiddity of Things — Threepenny Review (essay, 2025)

Rivals — 3:AM (fiction, 2025)

A Part — The Dodge (fiction, Summer 2025)

My Mother’s Hands: On Grief in 33 Beginnings — Agni (2024)

Things He Loves — Bull (fiction, 2024)

Vampire — Bull (fiction, 2024)

Our House — Kenyon Review (fiction, Autumn 2023)

Three Poems — Granta (poems, June 2023)

Portrait of the Artist as a Boy Crouching — Joyland (fiction, 2023)

Last Things — The Bureau Dispatch (fiction, 2022)

Monster — Threepenny Review (fiction, 2022)

And Then There Were Three — trampset (fiction, 2022)

On the Pleasures of Missing Out — Threepenny Review (essay, 2020)

Ghost Museum — Agni (2019) and Best American Essays 2020

[stilleatingoranges]

The significance of plot without conflict

In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures–which permeate Western media–have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.

The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general–arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.

Keep reading

[cavetocanvas]

Odd Nerdrum, String

[elvisbego]

BALTHUS

And then you sit in a cafe with a book on Balthus afraid to turn the page for fear of being seen       seeing what's on the other side.

[elvisbego]

ON CERTAIN TYPES OF WRITERLY PHOTOGRAPHY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Look at me

the image seems to say

filtered

amber

fossilised 

instantly nostalgic for the present

this desk here

these books

these papers

prove I am a writer

and not just a typist.

[elvisbego]

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

[spoliamag]

“In Kierkegaard’s analysis, when one becomes conscious that one’s indulgence in weakness is really a defiant refusal to accept one’s strength, a refusal to accept the grace of God, one realizes that the refusal to accept strength is demonic, a prideful clinging to one’s own ego-power. Part of accepting the suffering is to realize one has been in the grips of the devil.” 

- Linda Leonard

[elvisbego]

SIDEWALK EPIPHANY

And then, strolling along,

trying to collect your thoughts, 

you realise that all these years 

the main flavour note in takeaway coffee, 

the thing that made the whole thing hum, 

was cardboard.

[elvisbego]

TYPEFACE DESIGNERS

You do know, don’t you

that certain fonts

turn aunts

into cunts,

so stop doing that, won’t you?

[elvisbego]

Plaka, Milos #architecture #photography #streetphotography #greece

[elvisbego]

It is what it is. Painting by @saravqm

[elvisbego]

View this post on Instagram

Sara exhibits 4 Spatial Sketches. (at Carlsberg Byen)

[millionsmillions]

“The nightmare started when the police burst into his apartment and dragged him away in the middle of the night, along with the rest of the Petrashevsky Circle.” That time a 28-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was nearly killed for having thoughts against the state.

[artist-klee]

Pious northern landscape by Paul Klee

[artist-klee]

Hammamet with mosque by Paul Klee

[elvisbego]

Capitalism and Speed

Nothing could be more in the interest of Big Money than the artificial acceleration of life through electronics. If nothing can be seen clearly in the blur of velocity, if everything can only be apprehended as a fragment indistinguishable from any other object whether physical or moral, then thought itself will become wonderfully obsolete, and stupefied mammals with useful bank accounts will people the ruined world. Technology long ago divorced itself from any meaningful progress.

[elvisbego]

The Ballad of Soldier Aximander

I have a new story in the Fall issue of People Holding. 

The magazine is experimental and here’s what they do: I was sent a photo which had to form the basis for a story - and I came up with a prophecy about the last man.

#fiction #story #literature #apocalypse #peopleholding