From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Fellow Disjecta, Oh Sunny Danger Time
This essay features Leif and Katita as characters in a lived community, marking their transformation across the broader oeuvre. For the broader collection, see Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul and The Glass House.
A lyric essay and autofictional work by C. W. Smith, published in 2024 as the title piece of a three-part collection alongside Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul and The Glass House. The essay documents Smith's turning of forty—framed explicitly as the "year of fours"—and follows a journalism commission that led him across the Great Dividing Range to a solar-punk anarchist hacker-gardening community built atop reclaimed radar igloos and aircraft graveyards. This landscape inverts the depopulated data-farms of *A Complicated Surgery*,[1] transforming surveillance machinery into instruments of collective survival.
Leif and Katita both appear as transformed characters within this community. Leif emerges as the one-armed founder and host, his anarchist motto "Abolish Power, Grow Freedom" anchoring the collective's ethos; he operates a VR/Moondust music sim that stands in tension with Katita's grounded skepticism. Katita serves as property manager, her counter-voice tempering Leif's utopianism. The essay also incorporates the dog Combray (a Proustian reference); two handwritten letters from Gerald Murnane, discussing the principle "time is place"; and a recurrent imagined figure: "a girl who pushes a pinball machine across the Australian landscape, from the outback to the sea, to the moon's reflection."[2] Pirate radio appears as both historical fact (how the narrator met his wife) and metaphor for the community's broadcast self.
The work thus demonstrates Leif and Katita as instruments of return—not recycled stock characters, but deepened through recurrence in lived, imagined, and collective geography. It bridges the novel's fictional world with the author's own world, collapsing the frame.
See also
- C. W. Smith
- Leif and Katita
- Instruments of return
- Cyberpastoralism
- Gerald Murnane and the work of C. W. Smith
References
- ↑ Bible, section 8.
- ↑ Concordance, section 8.