A modest proposal.
The Rev. Donald Wildmon
American Family Association
Anytown, USA
Reverend—
Hi! How’s it going? —Oh, I know: we have our differences. In fact, you represent pretty much everything I think to be wrong with this world, with the possible exception of business shorts—you don’t wear business shorts, do you?
Good.
Despite all that, I refuse to believe there can be no common ground between any two people. We are people, after all; we have wants, we have needs, we have mothers and fathers, if we’re pricked we bleed, we like extra helpings of whatever it is we especially like to eat. Surely there is somewhere, somehow, some way our interests can be in alignment, and we can work together to the enrichment of us both, and the detriment of neither.
It’s one of those possible alignments I’d like to discuss with you now.
I had the idea when I first read about the boycott you’ve announced of the Home Depot. I will say that I admire your gumption, and your gall, and your persistence, but let’s, just the two of us, be honest with each other for a moment: we both know how this ends. It ends just like your boycotts of Ford, and of Disney, and of Citigroup, of American Airlines and Allstate, of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, of Wal-Mart and Kraft: with a whimper, not a bang. —Oh, you’ll get a flurry of press, and a shower of new donations, thanks to the announcement. And maybe the board of a charity somewhere out there on which a Home Depot executive sits will have to cut a program or let go a staffer due to budget cuts, and you can link that program or that staffer however tangentially to the fight for marriage equality or one of those “gay celebrations” you keep going on about, and you can take credit for that. And then next quarter when the Home Depot announces a drop in revenue that’s all but inevitable in the current economic climate, you’ll take credit for that, too. —And then you’ll announce your work is done, the boycott is now over, and besides you’re on to more important things, like look! Over there!
I’m sorry, Reverend, but the gag’s got whiskers. People are starting to catch on. You need to up your game.
And I and dozens, no, thousands, tens of thousands of writers and artists and musicians and cartoonists and photographers and actors and filmmakers and conceptualists, need—buzz. Publicity.
Attention.
Here’s what I have in mind: you set up a webpage. Nothing fancy, just a simple form attached to a reasonably robust database. The page would allow someone like me to enter the particulars of my project: what it’s called, what it is, how to find it. And then all of the things you might find objectionable about it. You could provide a checklist, to save on typing, and I could just tick off check marks next to occult content, drug use, profanity, explicit sexual content, fluid conceptions of sexuality, suspiciously leftist political cant. Maybe provide a text box so I can paste in some choice excerpts.
You then take the data provided and have an intern whip up a personalized boycott page. “BOYCOTT! The City of Roses promotes the homosexual agenda! Judge for yourself by reading the appalling excerpts below.” —I get shivers just thinking about it.
See, it’s the retail approach. The shotgun approach. The grass-roots autonomous viral heat-seeking meme-thing. Your followers are suddenly exposed to the overwhelming tide of filth out there on the internet, and to your valiant efforts to stem that tide—and, best of all, because art is so often made by starving artists, who run out of health insurance and have to take second jobs and end up delaying, curtailing, or even abandoning projects unfinished from time to time, well—think of all the credit you’ll be able to take! Your success rate will shoot through the roof, and you won’t even have to lift a finger.
And us?
Well, we’ll get to marvel at the surge of traffic and attention and revel in the outpouring of well-wishes and good cheer that come from all over the country whenever you announce one of your boycotts.
It’s a total win-win situation, Reverend.
Think it over.
—posted 5239 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of you & me
& everyone we know.
Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method; Portia’s song is not more inconsistent than the sorrow of Helen that she has brought death to so many brave men, and the pride with which she is first found making tapestries of them; than the courage of Achilles, which none will question, “in his impregnable armour with his invulnerable skin underneath it”; than the sleepers in Gethsemane, who, St. Luke says, were sleeping for sorrow; than the way Thesée (in Racine), by the use of a deity, at once kills and does not kill Hippolyte. This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one’s friends must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.
—posted 5239 days ago
“The music of the 1980s is a significant influence.”
I’m not ashamed; I admit freely I bought the damn thing for the cover. Because what a fucking cover, huh?
That it was actually a painting in one of the stories in the book, the story I’ll impolitically allow was the best in the book, is just a lovely lagniappe. —Anyway, it’s one of the Books Without Which, along with that dam’ pioneering War for the Oaks; those odd little off-shoots of mightabeen, urban fantasies scrabbling for what light and air they can find these days in the shadow of leather-trouser’d vampires and tramp-stamped lycanthropes.
I swear I had both of the early anthologies, having bought the one on a whim and going back for another, but only the one’s on the shelf these days; them and Finder’s the extent of my travels in the Borderlands, and that was some time ago. —Well, and The Last Hot Time, but that came later, and is more sideways than straight-on; Chicago, maybe and not Minneapolis? —Not that Minneapolis is Bordertown, not all on its lonesome. —I digress. Look!
All the stories are now done, and have been turned in to our publisher, Random House. The book is called Welcome to Bordertown—and that’s also the name of the story that Ellen Kushner and I wrote together for the volume.
So sayeth Terri Windling. And this would be the table of contents; do note the presence of among many other luminaries Sara Ryan and Dylan Meconis, both of them friends of this city, as well. (For inst.) —To be published in 2011.
—posted 5242 days ago
Comme un tambourin qui pleure sous les gouttes de la pluie;
Comme les chansons qui meurent aussitôt qu’on les oublie.
The previous announcement means I can also announce the online première of no. 11, “Rounds”: Monday, September 6th, and appearing Monday – Wednesday – Friday through September 17th. The paper will also make its debut at the aforementioned 10th Annual Portland Zine Sympsium on the last weekend in August, so if you ever really wanted to get a leg up on all the inevitable spoilers, this would be your chance.
While we’re at it, can I direct a little more of your attention to the PZS? They do a great job every year celebrating zines, free speech, and the ever-lovin’ DIY, and could always use a little help. Pony up or belly up, as you’re inclined. (I’m sure they wouldn’t turn you away if you were inclined to both.)
—posted 5247 days ago
I’m filing my nails while they’re dragging the lake.
What the hell, let’s call it: Monday, August 23rd will see the online première of no. 10, “Surveilling,” and all that that entails: portions appearing Monday, Wednesday, and Friday through September 3rd. The paper will premiere at the 10th Annual Portland Zine Sympsium, the weekend of August 28th – 29th, and thereafter be available at the usual locations; pre-orders for chapbooks should be available shortly.
Seven months out, instead of four. I should maybe learn not to make promises or predictions, you know?
—posted 5248 days ago
120,000 words into this endeavor—
—and it’s now I find the epigram:
The endeavor
To interpret a city
Airily,
By a mere wave of one’s words—
Presumptuous
A task for fools.
Come, fool!
—posted 5248 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of genre.
The confirmation of the candidate as a member of the group establishes the superiority of group opinion over individual opinion and the authority of the group to define this relationship as one governed by civic duties. It is the nature of these duties which determines the categories into which civic intelligence falls. The group can never be anything more than a superstition, but the categories assemble all available material into a textual Corpus. There being no real funtional group surviving, this Corpus of group texts is used as the rallying point of the group, the counterpart of the primitive clan totem, the outward and visible sign of a long-extinct grace.
The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These demands become the only “inspiration” countenanced, and theoretically all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human society. The occurence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of human intelligibility. —We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves; it is all criticism of criticism.
—posted 5274 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the one true only.
What Woolf saw on the onionskin that had passed through Dutton’s decrepit typewriter left him literally incredulous. “Who could possibly imagine,” he wrote, “that in 1905 an English civil servant, a Police Magistrate—what we now know to have been an imperialist—would sit hour after hour, day after day, writing poetry about f--ries or, as he called them, fays?”
—posted 5277 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of perspective.
In his reader’s report on this book Brian Attebery wrote, “Characters can be categorized variously as being immersed in, or wandering through, or fighting off invasions of the fantastic; readers, however, can take any or all of these positions at once, since they are constantly mediating between the fantasy world and their own experience.” Yet what I shall argue here is that the author seeks to control these choices, even while understanding the polysemous and proactive position of the reader. For many authors the task is to anticipate readers’ strategies as part of their own poetics. The core rhetorical strategy of fantasy remains the same: fantasy is constructed with precision through point of view. Like a perspective puzzle, if the reader stands in “the wrong place,” the image/experience will not resolve.
—posted 5293 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of playing it like
your hair’s on fire.
On the other hand, repetition is a common feature of the visceral playing of rock ’n’ roll pianists such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis’s recordings during the late 1950s invented a new kind of performance practice, where high-octane repetition became symbolic of “sound made phsyical,” brought alive through and by means of the body’s reanimation of it. Nyman accidentally discovered this aspect of rock performance when, having “played ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ like Jerry Lee Lewis… I discovered an approach to texture, an approach to piano playing, and a piano style which dictated the dynamic, articulation, and texture of everything I’ve subsequently done. It was born in one complete package.”
—posted 5295 days ago
