I blame it on George Bush.
No, really. It's all his fault my blog got all political and weird and off the beaten track of what I'd intended to be writing about here: Doing art and getting on with it after 9/11. I mean, that's why I spun off the Perfidy Report: to give me a place to rant against Bush and his Minions and the way the present is slowly revolving to repeat history, with Dubya as a dumb Mussolini or Franco, or even, if you push hard enough, Stalin. (Gulag Guantanamo, anyone?)
See what I mean? Just wind me up and watch me froth.
Emily pointed this out over lunch at the NY Botanical Gardens where we'd gone to see the Orchid Show (which resulted in my new Flickr account, where you can see all the pages of the book I did for the Highfields). I was having a brief wrestling matching with the Green-Eyed Dragon with the Thirteen Tails (scroll down), precipitated by Jen's gigantic number of blog hits. Em, who has a prodigious memory (either that, or I've got a very selective one) reminded me that I'd once wondered why anyone would post their practice writing on the net, which is what I've been doing, lately. Reminded of that, it does seem silly, and yet there is a rationale for it, which is that having an audience, no matter how small, makes one write.
But one of the things that makes Jen's blog so popular is her focus. I originally started this blog, or an early incarnation of it, immediately after 9/11 with the idea of chronicling how things changed and how we'd get on with life in that changed city; specifically what art would mean. I was in the throes of putting together Stories from the Ruins with Marcia and thinking about what place art has in life, mine and the public's, and then Bush started that war and art didn't seem as important as keeping an eye on where our civil rights were going and how quickly the government had shifted into bigoted fear-mongering. Like most of the Kottner tribe, I have a quick temper and a thousand things a day, especially injustices, will set me off enough to pontificate about them.
Nobody likes pontificators.
So I'm going back to my arts: fiction, poetry, artist's books, and general mischief. To mark the occasion, I'm just going to mention that I'm mailing off two submissions tomorrow, which you may or may not hear more about. At least I'm submitting stuff.
By the way, go check out V for Vendetta. See if some of it doesn't sound familiar.
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