Organizing your writing life

PLAYING CATCH UP: This has been a long week already, and it's only Wednesday. The production cycle for the magazine is taking forever this month, due to holidays, design issues, missed deadlines, blah, blah, blah. I won't bore you with those details. However, it has kept me late at the office and basically coming home and either flopping on the couch or working on logistics for the big New Year's Eve Show, Naked, Pagan & Uncensored at 7 Stages. If you haven't checked out the Word Diversity Collective website, please do. The line up for the evening is just stellar, and we just added Kodac Harrison to the bill, so he'll be playing music in the cafe at the midnight hour. And the other artists are equally impressive: Karen Wurl, Alice Lovelace, Cherryl Floyd-Miller, Dr. Madelyn Hatter, Lisa Allender and on and on and on. Do come out. It will be the best $20 bucks you've spent all year.

In other catch up news, all of the Phoenix Feathers chapbooks are now spoken for. They have gone all over America and to the UK, so hats off again to Cleo Creech for putting these works of art together. He's still planning to do these books quarterly and may even create a website to archive them. I think I forgot to mention last week that Stan D. is working with Franklin Abbott to create a poetry website, which will be like an online zine for GLBTQ poets. It will be live sometime early next year. Watch this space.

I never mentioned that about two weeks ago, Cleo and I went to see Sarah Silverman's outrageous stand-up film, Jesus Is Magic! She used every racial slur she could think of, and invented a few new ones. She fearlessly riffed on Sept. 11 ("American Airlines should embrace 9/11...their slogan could be...American Airlines-We Were First Through the Towers."), sex, AIDS and the Holocaust. Of course, Sarah is a good Jewish girl and she uses all of these tactics to make a larger point. I thnk Chris Parry at efilmcritic.com summed it up best:

She'll call herself a racist and make no bones about it, but while she's doing so, she's making the biggest jokes at her own expense. Like any great comedian, she realizes that the punchline isn't the point, but rather how you get there. The hidden meaning behind each low blow tells a much more important story than the sting of a line like, "the best time to get pregnant is when you're a black teenager," or a routine like this: "I dated a guy who was half-black, but he dumped me because I'm such a loser. Wow, I shouldn't say things like that, I'm such a pessimist...he was actually half-white." Sure, you could point a gnarled finger at Silverman and say she shouldn't say such things about ethnic groups, but you'd be missing the point that she cares more about freedom of speech than she does restricting nasty speech. If a Jew makes an Asian joke, then a Jew joke, then a black joke, then another Jew joke, is it racism or just a hefty helping of sharing around the ridicule?

Some of the jokes did make me uncomfortable, and with a full house, there was plenty of "should we be laughing at this?" kind of moments. I did laugh. The political correctness thing has gotten WAY out of hand, and Sarah helps put that in perspective. I mean, we're not even supposed to say "Merry Christmas" anymore because it might offend someone. Hell, I'm not religious by any means and I'll be glad when the holiday has passed and the mad rush is over, but it IS Christmas, so I say...get the fuck over it.

And of course, our Fearless Leader Dubya is back on the stump with a new message: "Many intelligence agencies judged that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and it's true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong." Well, duh, you big moron. With everyone in the free world making this point for the last two years, it finally dawns on the White House that they might as well concede the point. Dubya still says we have Stay the Course and get them "ter'ists" out of Iraq, but it's really hard to put any faith in a man who can't even find an unlocked door.