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You came! How nice of you. Come on in. Make yourself at home. Comfy? Okay then, we have something really important to tell you. The thing's been on our mind lately (notice, we share a mind, at least when we feel like to). It has to do with the nature of literature and the state it's in at the moment. People say it's dying. Even people who create it say that. A week or so ago, V. S. Naipaul, said (while promoting his new, and by his own admission probably last novel): "I really have no faith in the survival of the novel... there are too many other things today... to many things of distractions. The observations that the novel made are being made in many ways now... You can see a movie in two hours. Recently I decided to revive my interest in the classics again and in six months I borrowed and saw all the classics. You can't read books like that. For a book, you need to read and think for almost a week. No one has that kind of time anymore." We won't comment (it would be too easy to lament about how a Nobel laureate reduced himself to an American high school student), but we'll say: Feel like you don't have time? Where did it go? Who took it from you, and what else did they take with it? Feel like there's a quicker way of getting to know things? Why not forfeit your mind along with the desire to learn new things? Make that your only criterion: is it new, the idea expressed, the way in which it is said? Feel like you've been robed of space? Television abducted your attention, attention of people around you? Steal it back, rob them blind, freedom is never given, it is always taken, and the time has come when literature must take its own. Take your freedom! Take your space! Admit Two is free - free for the taking. Have a cookie while you're at it. NG&OR |
AdmitTwo, No. 2, November, 2004.
Art: Satan's
Got Your Ice Cream
& other misdemeanors "Eventually, I decided to not worry about perfection and just have fun and draw a few things on the canvas then she took a turn, and we went back and forth like that." - - - Fiction: The
Work Of Art In The Age Of Digital Reproduction (part
one) "...
what it means to be an artist is to fill out
endless grant applications (or to pay for someone to fill them out for
you) and going the route of middle class security. No more taking
risks. Yet everyone has always known that the middle class
solution is the most cowardly - it was always better to be either rich
or even poor - but never middle class. And it is the
poverty of middle class aesthetics that rules the art world these days,
along with its flimsy ideals."
- - - Of
Natural Causes Trying Of
Fitting Parts by Miriam N. Kotzin & Bill Turner
- - - Poetry: The Spirit of St. Louis & Friday the 13th And like drama masks, there are two of me: one who remembers you and longs to be back in your arms again, and one who hates myself for remembering and longing. by Bob Flanagan & David Trinidad from "A Taste of Honey" (Cold Calm Press, 1990) - - - Essay: by Natalija Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden "... today we have a society in which there exists prosperity of the individual and not the prosperity of the community. If one is able to achieve prosperity, everyone should be able to reach it. But not in the society where the purpose of all the group members is to enhance the prosperity of one group member, not in the society where one’s prosperity is measured by how far above the rest of the community he or she gets. In the society of today a single successful individual counts as proof of the prosperity of the entire society. In the society of the future a single individual left behind will be regarded as the failure of the society as a whole."
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