Tag Archives: Twisted Mass of Heterotopia

Fan Fiction Is Criticism Is Art

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This was one of those pieces where I said to myself as I was writing it, “I can’t believe a mainstream magazine is going to print this! That’s so cool!”

And as ever when I say that to myself, the editor who had accepted the pitch looked at it and didn’t get it. So, I thought I’d run it here for my patrons. This is my third Twisted Mass of Heterotopia column; if you like it, please consider donating to my Patreon so I can write more pieces like this.
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51xPgshGb8L._SX352_BO1,204,203,200_Fan fiction is despised. Criticism is despised. And both are despised for the same broad reason; they’re seen as parasitic. If a critic was a real artist, the critic would make a film rather than just writing about how superhero films are crap. If a fan fiction writer were truly creative, that fan fiction writer would develop their own characters and plots, rather than having Spock pour his heart out to Kirk for the gazillionth time. Great artists are originals; fan fiction writers and critics are derivative copyists, battened, like great aesthetic mosquitoes, upon the blood of their betters.

Charlie Lovett’s The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge must be doubly derivative, then, since it is both fan fiction and literary criticism. Lovett is best known for his best-selling book-centered mystery, The Bookman’s Tale. But in The Further Adventures he moves from broad bibliphilia to individual homage—or individual theft, if you’d prefer.

The short novella picks up twenty years after the end of Dickens’ famous A Christmas Carol. The formerly miserly Scrooge is now as renowned for his manic generosity and good will as he once was for his ill temper. “A generous, charitable, jolly, gleeful, munificent old fool, yielding as a feather pillow that welcomed the weariest soul to its downy breast,” as Lovett describes him in solid faux Dickensian prose. Determined to do even more good, Scrooge calls upon the Christmas spirits to work their nighttime magic on others: his newphew, his former-assistant-now-partner Bob Cratchitt, and his bankers. The result (spoilers!) is additional joy on earth for all.

The story is mostly an excuse to visit with Scrooge again, and for Lovett to splice in various passages from Dickens (the description of the the London slums from Bleak House, for example) with his own pastiche. But while the book is mostly tribute, it also functions as a criticism of the original novel. Early on, it mildly tweaks Dickens’ sentimentalism; Scrooge’s unfailing good cheer is, it turns out, as irritating as his former dyspepsia. Over twenty years, in fact, Scrooge’s “constant kindnesses had grown wearisome from years of use.” Is Scrooge generous, or is he, in his single-minded effort to store up treasures in heaven, really as selfish and unconcerned with others as he was in his single-minded miserliness? Maybe the ghosts didn’t change him all that much after all.

The main critique though, comes in the second half of the novella, when the ghosts lead Scrooge’s nephew to run for Parliament, and inspire his bankers to set up a permanent charity. Dickens’ Christmas Carol presents personal transformation as the route to social good; God reaches down and makes the world a better place by changing Scrooge’s heart. Lovett, though, suggests that ghost Marley’s chains can never really be taken from him through individual acts of kindness. Real change, and really helping people, requires political power and institutional investment.

Lovett’s combination of fan fiction and criticism isn’t an aberration. On the contrary, literary fan fiction like The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge frequently includes, or is based upon, a critical reading of the original work. Jo Baker’s marvelous Longbourn (2013), for instance, is a reworking of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of the servants. As such, it functions as a counter-intuitive, but powerful reading of the original novel. Suddenly, the Bennett household is built, not on the goodness and wisdom of Jane and Elizabeth, but on the raw hands and constant toil of the women below stairs who wash the sheets and make the dinner. And Elizabeth’s story is not so much about true love, as it is about the power and privilege which enable true love. “What it is to be young and lovely and very well aware of it,” the servant Mrs. Hill thinks while looking at Elizabeth. “What it is to know that you will only settle for the keenest love, the most perfect match.” Mrs. Hill could not settle for the perfect match; she fell in love with Mr. Bennett, had his child, then had to give the boy (Elizabeth’s half brother) away to avoid scandal. Austen’s vision of respectable, respectful love is only possible because she’s in a family, and a class, where they can afford respectable, respectful love. Other people aren’t so lucky.

Again, criticism is often seen as parasitic on original art. But in Longbourn, this is turned around. Jo Baker’s novel is essentially parasitic on critical insight. The kernel of the novel is the critical question, how is class erased in Pride and Prejudice? “The main characters in Longbourn are ghostly presences in Pride and Prejudice, they exist to serve the family and the story,” Baker says in an author’s note. “But they are—at least in my head—people too.” The commentary on, and critical reading, of Pride and Prejudice becomes a work of art of its own.

Jo Baker isn’t the only writer who builds her art on criticism. Jane Austen, famously, did the same in Northanger Abbey, a book which is a parody, or reworking, of the Gothic novels of Austen’s day. Just as Lovett questions the presuppositions of Dickens, and Baker questions the presuppositions of Austen, so Austen’s novel is an extended critique of the tropes of the Gothic. “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,” is Austen’s opening line—pointing not forward into the story, but backwards towards all those other Gothic narratives with extraordinary heroines. “She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features—so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush.” Austen is criticizing, and questioning those perfect, feminine, marked-for-destiny Gothic heroines, just as Baker criticized and questioned Austen’s own sprightly, self-confident, self-determining ones. If Baker is parasitic on Austen, then Austen is parasitic on those Gothic novels — or, more directly, on a critical analysis of those Gothic novels. If Baker is Austen fan-fic, why isn’t Austen Gothic fan-fic?

Dickens’ Christmas Carol is not a direct parody or reworking of another story. But still, Lovett’s fan fiction seems so much in the spirit of the original in part because A Christmas Carol functions in a lot of ways as a criticism, or fan fiction retelling, of itself. Scrooge starts out as a “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone…a squeezing, wreching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” That’s the iconic Scrooge…and then the rest of the book shows us what’s left out of the portrait, just as Jo Baker shows us what’s left out of Austen, and Austen shows us what’s left out of the Gothic. The ghosts don’t just transform Scrooge; they transform that original vision of Scrooge. We see his childhood; his love for his sister; his fiancé; we see, in other words, that the hard-hearted, miser Scrooge is not the whole story. Dickens could be seen as writing his own fan-fiction, creating an Elseworlds version of his own character. What if Superman had landed in Russia? What if Scully and Mulder had a passionate fling? What if Scrooge were a good man? That last is the premise of The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge — but it’s also the premise of A Christmas Carol.

Criticism, fan fiction, and original art seem like easily separable categories; Mark Twain’s works goes in the library, your online Twilight story about Edward and Jacob and all the things they do goes in the online forum, this essay you’re reading right here is in the TNR books section. But Mark Twain wrote Arthurian fan fic (and criticism) in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. E.L. James’ Twilight fan fic went to the best-sellers list. This essay is, admittedly, not likely to enter the western canon, but still, I contend that it’s inspired by the same impulse as Baker’s Longbourn, or Northanger Abbey or those further adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge. For art, for criticism, or for fan fiction, the question is always the same. How might this story be changed? Questioning the world, playing with the world, and creating the world — those things aren’t so different. We can maybe even write a story, or an essay, if we’d like, and imagine a place, much like this one, where they’re all the same.

Robocop vs. Your Offspring

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This post is one of my Twisted Mass of Heterotopia columns, supported by my Patreon subscribers. If you think it’s the sort of thing you’d like me to write more of, consider contributing (and thank you!)
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Robocop 2 was mostly, and not wrongly, ignored when it came out in 1990, but it did manage to spark a smidgen of controversy. One of its major villains was Hob, played by Gabriel Damon, who would have been 13 during filming and looked like he could easily have been a year or two younger. Hob curses foully, dispenses narcotics, attempts murder, and watched vicious bloodletting while barely blinking an eye. Then he dies in a sentimental, tearful scene clutching Robocops hand.

Critics were appalled. “The use of that killer child is beneath contempt,” Roger Ebert declared. David Nusair added, “That the film asks us to swallow a moment late in the story that features Robo taking pity on an injured Hob is heavy-handed and ridiculous (we should probably be thankful the screenwriters didn’t have Robocop say something like, “look at what these vile drugs have done to this innocent boy”).”

Ebert and Nusair aren’t exactly wrong. Robocop 2’s use of Hob is both gratuitous and cynical. Hob doesn’t need to be a child; everything he does could just as easily been given to an adult actor. There’s no effort to explain what a 13 year old is doing in the drug business, either. As far as the script is concerned, Hob is played by a 13 year old purely because it’s shocking to have him played by a 13 year old. It’s pure exploitation of a minor. Who can blame the critics for recoiling?

Still…I love Hob. I love him precisely because his presence in the film is so utterly, bracingly cynical. For most of the film, he embodies our hyperbolic fear and hatred of children; the preposterous inflated fear of a new generation of cynical pre-teen superpredators, the jaded youth terrifyingly familiar with vice. And then, in his death scene, when he’s no longer a threat, he becomes the perfect, heart-tugging victim. The film’s view of Hob turns on a needle from paranoia to pathos; from loathing to sentimental catharsis. There’s no attempt at connective tissue; no effort to make Hob a character beyond the tropes. He’s just Childhood Monster or Childhood Victim. There’s not even a pretense that he’s anything else.

I don’t know whether Hob is intentional satire, gleeful hyperbole, or sincere fever dream. Probably a little of all of those, if the scene with the pre-teen Little League team and their coach robbing a store is any indication. But whatever the motivation, the result comes across like a sardonic, giggling sneer at every Hollywood film that has ever whipped up moral panic about teens, or dropped a dead child onto its protagonist in the name of Real Emotion. From the bad news kids breaking jazz records in Blackboard Jungle to the kidnapped youngster motivating a tearful Tom Cruise in Minority Report, all the children on screen, everywhere, start to look like Hob. And suddenly you wonder, do we even care about these kids? Or do we just get our kicks by pretending that they’re nightmare demons, innocent angels, and/or both at once?

Roger Ebert adored Minority Report, dead kid and all, and Millenial think pieces continue to dot the Internet. If you use racial or gendered or homopohobic stereotypes, there’s at least a decent chance someone will point them out. But kids aren’t seen as a marginalized group, and tropes around them aren’t seen as invidious, or just aren’t seen at all. Kids really are innocent victims, right? Or else they really are dead-souled thugs in training who need to get off my lawn.

Robocop 2, though, takes up the difficult task of exploiting childhood so blatantly that you can’t look past it, even if you’re determined to set your eyeline a foot over Hob’s head. Robocop 2 presents a dystopic future in which we hate and fear and condescend to children, just like we do now, just with a little less hypocrisy.

He, She, and Apocalypse

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This post is my first Twisted Mass of Heterotopia column, supported by my Patreon subscribers. If you think it’s the sort of thing you’d like me to write more of, consider contributing (and thank you!)
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881824._UY200_Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She, and It isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic novel; her future world doesn’t end, and doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s about to in the near term. Still, there are a lot of little apocalypses scattered around in it—small scale disasters, of perhaps mildly more intensity than those you can see anytime you turn on the news. The greenhouse effect has pushed temperatures up worldwide; the sky is no longer blue, and going out into daylight without protective gear is potentially fatal. Plagues, famine, and infertility caused by toxic waste and radiation has reduced the earth’s population by half. Most dramatically, a nuclear terrorist attack and subsequent war utterly destroyed Israel and most of the Middle East.

In a recent post on HU, Jimmy Johnson pointed out that most mainstream apocalyptic visions ignore the existence of indigenous people, and, therefore, the existence of prior apocalypses. From the perspective of Native Americans, the European invasion looks a lot like the end of the world—and not less so because that end, with all its violence and humiliations, has been grinding on for 500 years and counting. Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and other big apocalyptic narratives often reference or nod to this colonial past—The War of the Worlds explicitly mentions England’s colonial adventures, for example. But indigenous peoples, or for that matter the oppression of marginalized peoples, is mostly ignored, erased by the giant whomp of one-size-fits-all-world’s-end. Everyone on earth is flattened in the same way; the earth becomes one, united in despair and disarray by an end that doesn’t play favorites, and so is unable to assimilate all those ends that did.

He and She and It‘s more heterogeneous apocalypse has a little more give. Most of the main characters are Jewish, and a parallel narrative about Prague in the 1600s links the city of Tikva, under siege from multinational corporations in the future, to the violence directed at Jewish ghettos in Europe in the past.

Less central to the story, but significant, is the fate of Israel itself. Though everyone assumes that the nation was utterly destroyed, it turns out a small group of people still live there. Nili, an assassin from the new Israel, explains:

We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days .We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.

In his essay, Johnson suggested that an apocalypse for the colonizers might look like salvation for the colonized. That seems to be exactly what Piercy has imagined. The old order of occupied and occupier was wiped from the earth, and in its place there is, not a two state solution, but a single feminist utopia, obliterating the distinctions between Jews and Muslims, and obliterating too the hoary trope of indigenous misogyny. The mistreated women in their burqas who the west supposedly must save; they’re cloning themselves without men now in vats, and coming back, perhaps, to save you. More, many of the surviving Jews are dark-skinned, since, Malkah, a Jewish grandmother and cyberneticist explains “the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.”

Apocalypses are often about appropriation of indigenous experiences; the Martians invading England as England invaded America, the totalitarian nightmare of 1984, built, surely, from Orwell’s experiences being the totalitarian police in Burma. He and She and It, though, doesn’t appropriate other people’s experiences. Instead, it picks up the Jewish history of diaspora and oppression,and tries to imagine a future that honors that history rather than Israel’s current, ongoing colonial infliction of apocalypse.

Honoring the history of oppression means you have to remember the history as oppressor, too, though. Malkah talks about reading “a poem by Mara Shliemann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having had a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption.” If the Holocaust was an apocalypse, echoing the pogroms in Prague, the Israeli occupation is another. Both are part of Jewish history now, the novel says, no matter what disaster befalls. And that means that any disaster for Jews has to be looked at in at least two ways, and any utopia does as well.

Malkeh journeys to Israel at the end of the novel in the hopes of having her sight restored; the Jewish/Palestinian Israel is behind the rest of the world in some things, but it has made great advancements in artificial enhancements, including eyes. After the apocalypse, we may see better what difference offers. One apocalypse is a disaster, but if you’ve got enough of them, some may be opportunities. As Karmia, a woman who may be Jewish or may be Palestinian, tells Malkeh, “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

No Trenchcoat for the Giant Squid

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So, as some of you probably know, I’m currently working on a Patreon to fund one column a week about topics I can’t get mainstream sites to publish. (The column will be called Twisted Mass of Heterotopia, by the by — or it is called that, since this is the first one!)

This piece is a kind of sample of the sorts of things I might write about. I initially placed it at a lovely little crime fiction site called The Life Sentence. But before it could get published, the site shut down. Because there’s no business model that makes printing things like this affordable.

So, since it was homeless, I figured I would run it here. If you’d like to see essays like this on a regular basis, please consider contributing.

Thanks also to Lisa Levy, my editor, who offered a bunch of suggestions that made the piece better.

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s 1987 graphic novel Watchmen famously opens with a murder mystery: the Comedian, superhero and government operative, has been thrown to his death from his upper-story apartment. The detective investigating the crime, trench coat and all, is the brutal, deadly superhero Rorschach. After the police leaves he invades the Comedian’s apartment in a grid of light and shadow, his body leached of color as a semi-silhouette against dramatic squares of black and yellow. In this context, Rorschach’s masked face, with its shifting globs of black on white, becomes a genre reference. The superhero’s secret identity in Watchmen is noir — at least until Moore and Gibbons undermine that, as they undermine most everything else.
 

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Watchmen is probably the most critically acclaimed superhero comic ever ;,regularly appearing high up on best of comics lists, and even garnering a spot on Time’s list of 100 Best Novels,. It is perceived as, and presents itself as, serious art . And part of the way that it presents itself as serious art is by using the tropes of tough pulp crime .

Compared to highbrow lit, crime fiction can seem declassé. But superhero comics have long been aimed at children, and have a tradition of whimsical goofiness — Captain Marvel fighting an evil sentient worm, or Wonder Woman bouncing off to the stars on the back of a giant space kangaroo, In comparison, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson come across as relatively validating and adult. Crime lends superheroes grit, seriousness, and realism.
 

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And so Rorschach’s origin story involves the true-crime 1964 Kitty Genovese rape . In a case early on in his career Rorschach investigates a child’s murder, and ends up killing her killers in bloody fashion. He later breaks a man’s fingers for information, and tracks down a crime boss in a shadowy prison saturated with enough blood and tough talk to fit neatly into the lineage stretching from Assault on Precinct 13 to Oz.

Watchmen created a whole slew of adult, gritty violent superhero narratives in its wake. One of the most notorious was a 1994 Green Lantern story in which GL”s girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. Another was the 2004 series Identity Crisis in which Sue Dibny, the wife of that silly character, the Elongated Man, was brutally murdered. These comics were not necessarily highly thought of, but they show the trend towards using crime and pulp violence as a way to signal adult fare, and separate superheroes from their infantile past. There’s nothing like a murdered superspouse to demonstrate that comics aren’t for kids any more.

The most recent high-proifle example of superhero crime as validation is the highly aclaimed Daredevil Netflix series. Daredevil is the most ground-level, grimy, street-level-crime focused Marvel franchise since 1998’s Blade.  The series is loosely based on the also much-admired Frank Miller/Dave Mazzucchelli graphic novel Born Again  — not so much in its plot as in its vision of Matt Murdock fighting alone against the Kingpin and his tangled web of organized villainy. Daredevil’s origin story (in both comic and television) involves his boxer dad enmeshed in a price- fixing scheme. On Netflix, his first episode battle is against human traffickers. These familiar genre narratives signify realism because they ooze a familiar corruption and sleaze.
 

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The fact that the Kingpin is involved in a complicated gentrification scheme seems like meta-commentary . The upscale skyscraping jauntiness of Iron Man or Thor or even Ant-Man has no place here in these grim, rent-controlled, crime-ridden streets. Daredevil is tougher and truer because he’s fighting street-level dealers and pimps and local-news-headline scum. The hero has supersenses (not very realistic that) but he usually uses them to figure out whether people are lying so he can torture them in classic tough guy style. The interdimensional alien invasion which closes out the Avengers film serves as the backdrop for the Daredevil series — the evil Loki’s monster army destroyed all the buildings that the Kingpin plans to rebuild.  But that decidedly un-gritty invasion backstory serves as a foil. Those silly things fly around up there in someone else’s superhero narrative. Here (for the most part) our superpowers are dark, serious, and earth-bound.

An alien of sorts also whooshes in at the conclusion of Watchmen — and not coincidentally, that ending has often been seen as one of the series’ weakest moments. All the grim darkness and dark grimness, and this is the end? Rorschach’s pulp investigation turns out to be a preposterous red herring set up by super-villain/hero Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. No one was out there murdering superheroes, as Rorschach thought. Instead, it was all a distraction from Veidt’s plan to build a giant Cthulhu-analog complete with broadcasting psychic-brain and explode it in New York, thus uniting the world against the alien invaders. The whole thing is utterly preposterous sci-fi goofiness. And Rorschach, our intrepid detective, is disintegrated by Dr. Manhattan with an energy blast. So much for realism.
 

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I remember reading Watchmen when I was in high school and being hugely disappointed by the goofy conclusion (did I mention Ozymandias catches a bullet? He’s got Tibetan mystical skills or something, so he catches a bullet.). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the ruthless silliness with which Moore undercuts his own pulp validation.  Rorschach thinks that crime and the brutal law of the streets is reality. As a ground-level detective, he figures that the problems he faces are ground-level problems that he can work out. Solve a murder, find the killer, break a few fingers —maybe it won’t save the world, but it’s doing good by inches in the muck of Real Life.

But what if Real Life isn’t particularly real? What if all that local-news-panic crime doesn’t actually matter? Veidt saves the world in one big rush by dropping a gigantic alien bomb — or possibly he doesn’t save anything, and just kills a whole mess of people, like George Bush rushing into Iraq. Either way, he and his ridiculous megalomaniacal schemes are a lot more real, in the sense of real consequences, than Rorschach wandering around looking for some cape-killer who seems small-scale enough to exist but actually doesn’t. Pulp conspiracy theories are too small; the people at the top have bigger plans. There are supervillains, and they always win. All the time.

Watchmen is often credited with deconstructing, or undermining, superhero tropes — with showing how naive and silly the caped saviors are. That’s a reasonable way to read the comic. But I think, by the end, you could see it not as a deconstruction of supeheroes, but as a way to use superhero tropes to deconstruct, and undermine, the grim gritty myth of pulp noir crime realism. At the end of Watchmen, Rorschach is dead, and the debris and blood is being washed and cleansed away from the New York streets. The future is gleaming and shining and new. and littered with dead bodies. The small scale cop solving just one murder at a time seems almost too cheerful—an exercise in Nostalgia, which, not coincidentally, is the name of the perfume line Ozymandias’ company abandons at the conclusion of the comic. A fake alien is more real in the end than a fake gumshoe. And compared to the machinations of the superpowers, crime looks less like reality, and more like a distraction.
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Patronize Me!

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Hey, folks. So, I have finally gotten with all the hip kids, and posted a Patreon account. The hope is that folks will donate to have me write a weekly column here at HU, where I will write about all those cultural things that are too unpopular, or old, or weird to write about on mainstream sites.

The name of the column will be Twisted Mass of Heterotopia; the exciting page where you can patronize me and all I stand for is here.

Some longtime (or even not so longtime) readers will be saying, hey, you write about this sort of thing on HU for free all the time! Why do you suddenly need money? A good question! There are two answers:

1. I’d like to start getting paid for what I do here, rather than putting all the work in for free;

2. As I get more freelance work, I’ve had less and less time for the blog, and especially less and less time to put in to in-depth posts on topics I’m not poking at elsewhere for other reasons.

Folks may also be curious how or whether this will change the rest of the blog, outside my writing. The short answer is, I”m not sure. Obviously, if no one throws money my way, nothing will change…though the blog has been in something of a lull for a few months, as my attention has been elsewhere, and I’ve been less engaged in getting new contributors.

If I do manage to get a paying column going, that would mean I would be getting paid here and others would not. I do hope, if I make some of my stretch goals, to pay a guest poster every month…but that may be pie in the sky, and in any case obviously wouldn’t fund paying for every post. I will still be doing volunteer posts here, and hope others would as well, but if people aren’t comfortable doing that given the changed circumstances (if they do change) I’d certainly understand that, and HU might transition to more of a place for my column and musings rather than a group site…but again, that would really be up to what contributors want to do.

This is all getting ahead of myself though. It’s entirely possible this won’t work. But! If you’d like to make it happen, and boldly go where some have gone before but not me, please consider contributing.

Here’s my exciting marketing statement explaining what I think I’m doing. Be swayed by the marketing!

Point your internet to the cultural arbiter of your choice, and chances are you will stumble upon a Game of Thrones think piece. Or a Taylor Swift think piece. Or a Marvel supeheroes think piece. Or maybe on a think piece about Taylor Swift being bitten by a radioactive fantasy novel. With great power, winter is coming. Shake it off.

The point is that mainstream sites tend to write about the same popular things, because popular things are popular. And that’s fine; I’ve written my share of Game of Thrones and Taylor Swift and Avengers think pieces. But I’d also like to write about Nora Olsen’s YA LGBT thriller “Maxine Wore Black”, or how Chuck Berry invented rap, or how D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel is that rare thing, Holocaust art that does not suck.

That’s where this column comes shambling in. Twisted Mass of Heterotopia will focus on art you don’t usually get to see covered in mainstream venues. The lens will sometimes be feminist, sometimes formalist, and sometimes something else. But the goal is a column once a week at my site, the Hooded Utilitarian. Stretch goals include guest posts from other awesome writers.

All backers will get early notification of column topics and the secret explanation of the column title. Backers higher levels can get ebooks, a chance to commission a column, and other goodies.

As a writer, it is enormously exciting to have the chance to get paid to write about what interests or fascinates or disgusts me, without having to worry about clicks or the brutal tyranny of the news hook. Thank you so much for supporting me. I really appreciate it.

 
There are various goodies if you contribute, including free ebooks which do not exist yet but which I will figure out how to create if anyone actually puts in money at that level. And my wife pointed out that if no one contributes, I can at least write an article about my failed Patreon campaign…which oddly didn’t comfort me quite as she seemed to think it would. But I’ll take what consolation I can, I suppose.