The Day the Small Press Scene Died
Some horrible stuff seems to have gone down in the Toronto small press community while I was in New Denver. I've just been catching fragments of it. It was only over the past week, as I got wind of the Horrible Fracture, that I've been able to piece things together, at least a bit.
Anyways, it really saddens me. Because I really care a lot about many of the people involved, including the asshole, the misogynistically mocked, and the publisher.
Maybe because of my history with the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, I've always had such a positive community vision of the local small press scene. But that image is being eclipsed by something really ugly that's festering and bubbling over in the blog and listserv world. And live, as well.
I most likely can't make the fair this spring, for only my second time ever. And maybe it's a good time to be taking a break.
I hope everyone involved gets therapy. And realizes what a horrible waste of creative energy hatred is.
Over and out.
posted by Razovsky @ 11:46 pm
12 Comments
12 Comments:
what happened? i'm so far out of the loop i almost feel inside it. isn't hate a misguided attempt at love? perhaps it was all a bad dream over a misspelled word or a wet dream over a new world or an old scene that needs to fall apart before it can come back together. whatever the case, it can't be more serious than dick cheney, can it? is he serious? it just occurred to me he's laughing at us for taking him so seriously. all this time he's been pulling our collective legs and we misread the signals and now, for punishment, the small press empire is crumbling. balconys are falling from the sky. they're raining on stu's dreams and independent bile is pooling counter-clockwise on empty parades. what's next? perhaps a little monty python...let's hope we're not too late to catch the 200 metre freestyle for those who can't swim.
Yeah, what happened? I'm out of the loop too, though I'm in the same city and apparent community where this is taking place. I guess I've been so frantically making covers for dig. and proofing the poems and planning a reading, that I missed the death of the small press scene altogether!
It sounds unfortunate that people are fighting, and that misogyny is involved. Like there isn't enough sexism in the world, not to mention a disturbing rate of violence against women lately. Misogyny always seems even more shocking when it's withan an arts community, there's a real misconception that it doesn't exist there.
So fill us in, who's bashing who these days? Trying to guess would probably get me into trouble...
Jen
chiming in for info
p.s.
small press will never die
hold on folks..seems as though debby florence has singlehandedly resurrected the small press! three cheers for debby!!! hip hip hurray! hip hop herray! trip hop manray! i just knew someone would come to the rescue. (now that i have your attention, can i send you a manuscript for possible publication?)
(note: you'll soon be getting a lot of these requests since most everyone else in the small press scene is now too busy with infighting, bickering and backstabbing... sometimes it pays to live in big sky country.)
At first i laughed, but then i wondered if Rox is being really sarcastic....was that an underhanded move? Is this a Bloggamooga comments-box fracture? How disappointing, seeing how Rox and I have barely intracommented!
moi? sarcastic? that might imply that i was artful enough to execute a wounding remark. i assure you i'm only being playfully ironical and uncommonsensical. to me, underhanded only counts in softball. but, hey, if you want to play hardball...let's have at it. it's the american way. (oops, maybe that was a little sarcastic)(but i like the idea of debby singlehandedly saving the small press world from itself. very heroic and small pressistic.) lets prove the pentagon wrong and work our fractures out peaceably in the court of intracommentation.
i dunno, i was raring for a good fight myself
but not a real one.
ps and maybe i will , anyways. i heart small press.
i triple heart small press and double dare ya to dispprove it! hey, come on...let's all pull each other's bootstraps up and into the great inky way of hand done micro runs. let's all share a moment of silence for d.a.levy. before we fly on a shoestring to the shangra-la of small pubs. the first five pints are on me.
...or are you saying you'll small press me or start a fight or start a fake fight or ride a bicycle pulling books or ace your finals or finalize your aces or small press your heart or all seven of the above at the same time? good golly, these bloggamooga interpersonal relationships are fun to sail, aren't they? thanks to stu, we'll always have our surrealism to fall back on. hope angela's feeling better.
oh no, i just realized i missed my therapy appointment because i was too busy writing comments on bloggamooga. see stu, this is what happens to us. we can't stop bloggamooga-ing. it makes us shimmy n shake n bake n wonder n blunder n sooner than later we start missing important dates n pages of the calendar go missing n before we know it we're all under your captive small press spell. it's a miracle! i can walk again!! even might trying flying to toronto! thank you stuart ross for changing my cyberlife. a deeper electronic humanism is washing over me.
i feel the same way (or i imagine i feel the same way but that's a preposterous statement). however, it seems we're writing under the bloggamooga radar. the audience has moved on to more recent entries and we're back here stuck in a blogwarp spinning inspiration to each other. do you think stu reads comments this far back? does he read all his comments? does he count them and is he thinking, wow, that's 13 comments on this entry? or does he stop counting when the comments evolve away from the original entry? wonder if the nsa crunches blog comments too? is this the new taboo? it almost seems...mmmmmm...illicit. thx1138ish. an unsanctioned meeting behind the curtain to breathe new life into the dying embers of a press scene gone to seed. we could be heroes...just for one day.
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