The New York Post September 25, 2012 THE POWER OF DIRTY WORDS--Illustrated!!! by Norman Spinrad In memorium: Lenny Bruce Fuck, shit, piss, cunt. Have I gotten your attention? Of course I have! These words have that magic power. As we all know, fuck, shit, piss, and cunt are the rock bottom basic “dirty words.” Neither the New York Times nor any other establishment publication will print them. They may not be uttered on broadcast television. Copulate, defecate, urinate, vagina. These four words mean precisely the same things, but are perfectly kosher for polite discourse, publication, and prime time. We all know that too, but do we all know why copulate, defecate, urinate, and vagina are “clean,” whereas their exact synonyms, fuck, shit, piss, and cunt are “dirty?” Why these words even have the power to re
I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteMr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
ReplyDelete