the intro
Hope to see you at the launch tonight! 7 pm @ the Catholic Worker Maryhouse
“Where the people can sing, the poet can live.” -James Baldwin
If you haven’t noticed by now, postmodern culture is cracking. The NYTimes is publishing features on Dimes Square trad Caths. A slew of postliberal candidates and pundits are metastasizing on both the political right and left. And debaucherous queers are creeping out from the woodworks once again, who’d much rather get coked up at a rave or vote red than be featured in the latest HRC ad campaign or be the object of your altruistic allyship.
The naïve trust in personal autonomy, rationalism, and the benevolence of the human will has had its moment, and alhamdulillah that moment has passed. Thanks to the spergy musings of figures like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud, the foundations that undergirded the edifice of modernity have been ripped out from under us, forcing us to reckon with the extreme polarities that we humans are inevitably caught between: sin and sanctity, nature and artifice, God and the devil, life and death. The delusional aspiration to bourgeois complacency is over…and we are left to choose which transcendent pole to strive toward.
And yet many of us seem to remain trapped in the Weberian iron cage of disenchantment. Though the “supernova effect” (as Charles Taylor might say) of postmodernism affords us a plethora of avenues down which to tread, the haze of debris left by the collapse of modernism makes it difficult for us to find a way out the neoliberal Western paradigm that–while celebrating diversity and freedom on the surface–leaves us atomized, enslaved, and confused.
Think of this zine as your road map, your guide out of the cage. Perhaps you may not agree with everything you read. Perhaps it may scandalize you (even I, the curator, am scandalized by some of the pieces we are publishing). Perhaps you may want to write a screed against us on Twitter and destroy our chances of future employment (and overall happiness). By all means, go ahead and “do you, gurl”...but I must beg you–don’t let your immediate reaction serve as an excuse from confronting the questions implicated in what you’re currently holding in your hands.
“The urban child,” claims the high priestess of postmodernity and overall bad b**ch Camille Paglia, “sees the harshness of the street; the rural child witnesses the frightening operations of nature. Both have contact with an eternal reality denied the suburban middle-class child, who is cushioned from risk and fear and who is expected to conform to a code of genteel good manners and repressed body language that has changed startlingly little since the Victorian era.” The content of this zine resists the bourgeois logic embodied by suburban life, with its esteem for predictability and security, taste for blandness, hostility to ethnic spice, and bent toward isolation and away from social friction. Nature, art, and our fellow human beings can both provoke us to contemplate eternal beauty and drag us down into an abyss of destruction. Sure, you can cover your eyes. But at a certain point, don’t be surprised when something cracks through your fingers.
There’s a reason why Dorothy Day, an OG girlboss and one of the greatest to ever crack postmodernity, started her houses of hospitality in cities and farms. Suburbia is by nature inhospitable to human beings–at least to the ones who find themselves incapable of morphing into rootless, faceless automatons. As James Baldwin keenly observed, the poet can only survive where people can sing…that is, where the human heart–with all of its complexity and incoherence, its joys and sorrows–can freely express itself….and tbh I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone spontaneously burst out in song in the suburban streets. It’s in the urban and rural environments where that which is most poetic in human nature–the capacity to perceive something between the lines of everyday life…to grasp at the mysterious–can be unleashed.
The content in this zine–from the articles and poetry to the art and photography–attempts to look at the full picture of our postmodern moment, snarkily critiquing its pitfalls and highlighting with mirth and gratitude its beauty. We attempt to move past vague and unhelpful platitudes about the relativity of truth and morality, and self-referential constructions of identity and desire. Nor do we advocate for adherence to truth in the abstract or to rigid moral ideals imposed by force. Rather, our hope is to forge a space where that which is most true and beautiful in the cosmos can attract that which is most essential to our nature as human beings, causing our hearts to break out in song and dance.`
To order a copy of the zine, please email stephenadubato at gmail dot com. We are still accepting donations to defray the cost of printing the zine. Please email if you’d like to make a contribution.
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See you tonight!