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2004.
Leap
year, Election
year. Year of the Monkey.
Whatever else the prognosticators and soothsayers say about our forward
march into this new millennium, one thing seems certain—the
pronoun our has more cache that it ever has before. American
troops in Iraq, Pokemon in the pockets of Irish immigrants in Sioux
City, sites online where you can mail-order a kit to fabricate an
authentic Irish
pub, new publicity that Yao Ming, the seven-foot-five inch Chinese
center who plays basketball for the Houston Rockets, is the new spokesman
for McDonald’s,
the fast food chain represented in over ninety percent of the world
including Serbia and Saudi Arabia, even a “barber shop and beauty
salon run by Halliburton’s Kellogg
Brown & Root” in the Green Zone, a sprawl in the middle
of Baghdad. Globalism as something more than a concept has achieved
critical mass, and whether what’s being imported and exported
is relevant or compassionate, inclusive or genuinely diverse, is not
for us to say—it’s enough that we see the world reflected
around us, that we can visit more countries, that we can enjoy a pint
of traditional Irish stout from the comfort of our own home. And so
our world hurtles forward, spanning broadband and bandstands, spinning
at roughly the same rate it always has, take a few ten-thousandths
of a second, growing simultaneously more global and more commercial,
moving beyond the pale of good and evil, except in politicians’
rhetoric, into something flashier and fleshier, longer-lasting yet
more superficial. In the wake of this hypnotic gyration we offer the
next issue of Drunken Boat.
Norman Mailer, an interview with whom we feature in this issue, is
a true iconoclast and perhaps one of the best exemplars of how we
might navigate the protean, ever more international waters we find
ourselves in. As he wrote in his seminal work, “Advertisements
for Myself,” presaging Pop Art and corporate branding, “I
become an actor, a quick-change artist, as if I can trap the Prince
of Truth in the act of switching a style”; so, as America underwent
its own convulsive changes from decade to decade, Mailer tried his
hand at a variety of genres, from novels to screenplays, poems to
“new journalism,” adopting guise after guise, even running
for mayor of New York, and incurring the wrath of faction after faction
in the process, yet never swerving from his object, the Prince of
Truth, whom, it must be said, is more djinn than royalty, a wispy,
ephemeral figure that takes the shape smoke makes and even that only
for a moment. Still, as any avid hunter will tell you, fulfillment
lies in the chase, and few writers of the last century have quarried
their prey with the fervor and intensity of Mailer. Now, having entered
his eighty-first year, Mailer remains a feisty commentator on what’s
happening in the world. “Use of language is dangerous when there
is no respect for it,” he proclaimed in a recent interview with
an editor of the in the St. Petersburg Times, “what characterizes
the Bush administration is their prodigious disrespect for it. As
I once had a character say in a novel, you can’t stop a man
who’s never been embarrassed by himself. And that’s George
W. Bush. He looks upon the language as a tool. It’s a good mallet
and chisel to cut into the sentimental needs of the American public
who come around like hound dogs to certain words, like patriotism,
America, flag and security. I always say that America is the real
religion
of this country.”
The rest of Issue #6 is devoted to new works from some of the most
promising and influential artists from around world in poetry, photography,
prose, web art, cybertext, video, and sound art. To abide in their
creations, which traverse the range from vast interactivity to compressed
rumination to multiple trajectories in between and beyond, is to feel
the sense that, contrary to the prevalent version of globalism that
feels more like hostile takeover than harmonic interaction, there
are shoots of vital communication stirring, tendrils that have roots
embedded deep in the soil of our shared history, in the community
an authentic work of art makes with every other authentic work, something
timeless and enduring. It is the historical sense T.S. Eliot referred
to in his essay Tradition
and the Individual Talent, that which “compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within
it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order,” except that we,
being his global progeny, would make that he a (s)he, would turn writing
into a subset of expression, would amplify the whole of European literature
so that it encompasses the world and the arts, would trace our lineage
not just from Homer,
but from Sappho
and Rumi.
Jean
Genet, Frida
Kahlo, Gerhard
Richter, Gertrude
Stein, Emma
Goldman, Joseph
Bueys, Virginia
Woolf, and Marcel
Duchamp, not to mention the vast multitude of other creators who’ve
left an indelible mark on our perceptions. This latest issue is our
contribution to the ongoing discussion of how art in its many forms
impinges on us and helps to shape our world.
-Editors, Drunken Boat
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