‘As her blood boils, she can’t take any more
Of them selling her kind for nothing
She dances zeibekiko on the tables barefoot
A sharpened axe
In her bruised, swollen hands
Loneliness,
Our loneliness,
It’s our loneliness I’m talking about
Held in our hands, it’s an axe
Above your heads, always circling, circling, circling

– Katerina Gogou*

The Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage gathers together new kinds of writing about ‘vibes’, those often unspoken energies of desire and aversion that move between people, palpable but traceless, hard to prove. The messages sent by your gut that you can’t always interpret, beyond an urge. What is intangible – vibes, feelings and reflexive responses like blushes, fidgets, slumps in posture, fluctuations in voice – is now targeted by invasive technologies of affective measurement. How can writing resist this regime of quantification?

With an introduction by Maria Fusco, contributions and new work by CAConrad, Mel Y. Chen, Adam Gallagher, Alexandrina Hemsley, Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Natasha Papadopoulou, Naomi Pearce, Parsa Sanjana Sajid, Patrick Staff, Daniella Valz Gen, and Hypatia Vourloumis. This issue’s archive is dedicated to Katerina Gogou.

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based mostly in London, whose work explores biographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance of subjectivity. Her writing has been published in Spells, Ignota (2018) and Fiction as Method, Sternberg (2017), among others.

*Lyrics translated by Erica Scourti, from the end of ‘I Monaxia’ (Loneliness), in Idionimo, 1981.