The Big Slips Slips Launch!

This may seem an odd thing for an online blogger to say, but at this moment in history the most constructive acts of affirmative dissent against encroaching techno-autocracy will take place in real space. They have to. Live performance, pageants, parades, protests, parties, ceremonies, salons, and other such events where real people get in real rooms together, far from intervening devices, those will be the only free happenings. And in those spaces, the sharing of tangible, material, human handiwork like art and craft and printed matter, will be the only free exchanges.

How I wish every piece of writing I’ve put on this blog existed in printed form someplace. Increasingly, I’m going to attempt to transplant the best of it into book form. The rest of it, I forecast, is doomed, as the twin tyrannies of the mob (by way of the algorithm) and the government (controlled by a corporate oligarchy) combine to exile and ban independent voices. I know that sounds paranoid and I wince at how it makes me sound, but all empirical indicators point to that as our future. Major media, both social and traditional, have been interfered with in major ways in recent times, and I can’t imagine that will reverse itself anytime soon, probably not in our lifetimes. (See my earlier piece on the topic here). It’s only a matter of time before our minders get around to clamping down on platforms like WordPress. It’s a partial consolation, I guess, that we’re all such small fry here that there’s probably no hurry. But once they set their sights on it, it will be an easy matter to impose censorship on websites like this, and because it’s a worst case scenario, of course they will.

What a grim introduction to a joyful topic! I didn’t mean it that way, but I only want to underline my appreciation for an undertaking that now carries a much heavier freight than it might have done formerly. My two good friends and a third new friend have just launched a literary and visual arts publication which they call by the delightfully infuriating name Slips Slips. I actually love the name, and the source of it is Gertrude Stein, whom I adore, but, the very reason I do love it is that it’s a problem. It’s never going to be easy to say, or explain, or Google, or anything. It’s like the flies in The Flies, it’s destined to be a perpetual, maddening irritant, and I’m sure that’s why they went that way, because therein lies its value, in this era of suicide by convenience. Lenin was partially right, though the truth of it took much longer to manifest than anyone thought a century ago, and it ended up playing out somewhat differently than he envisioned: capitalists have sold consumers the rope with which they hung themselves. We’ve become a people without any purpose beyond our own ease and comfort. Like Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, we sold our freedom for cheap milk and eggs (which were never delivered, by the way).

Slips Slips is not a political publication by any stretch per se. It is not full of polemics and diatribes and calls to arms. On the other hand, its very existence is political. In this time of monopoly and electronic herd-think, to be independent is to be seditious. In a time of calculation and literalness, to be heedless and elusive is rebellious. And in a zone where wealth is the only measure of merit, to be purposefully non-profitable by design is pretty perverse.

Slips Slips exists only on paper. You can only get it in stores or by mail. It has no cover price, although readers are certainly encouraged to kick in, if they can afford it. I’m old enough to remember when there were uncountable publications like it. Today, there is as much dodo about it as there is Dada. To start a new one in an era when even so-called educated people never read poetry but love to laugh at it is the best kind of cuckoo. The only kind of cuckoo for me.

On Saturday night, the Slips Slips editor/publishers Hope Cartelli,Kristen Leigh, and Jeff Lewonczyk, held a launch party for the premiere issue (get it? launch? slip? only you sailors will get that). The affair was held in the front room salon at Dixon Place, a locale near and dear to many of our hearts. Many old friends gathered, and some new ones were made.

The heart of the evening was a line-up of readings. There is a wonderful video of the proceedings taken by the one and only Bryan Enk. You can watch it here. My piece comes in at 45:23. (Oh yes, I’m a contributor)

And here are some more friendly frolickers:

.

If you’d like to hold a copy up and make funny faces too, here’s how to get your copy of Slips Slips! Vive la résistance!