the first amendment
9/22/2004 @ 11:29 pm Comments (35)greetings. if you’ve arrived at this site by word of mouth, or because you saw a sticker in a coffeehouse bathroom that said “phineas poe if you want to live call 911,” or because a stranger came up to you on the street and slipped you a copy of Kiss Me, Judas, I thank you for coming this far. and I thank all of the street team folk who plastered their outlying worlds with Phineas stickers and delivered the gospel of Poe.
now I’ve got a story for you, one I’m still trying to wrap my noodle around, a story that comes to us from Littleton, Colorado. which as I understand is an hour or so outside Denver, give or take random variables such as traffic and weather. now granted, this is Columbine country. the people who live in those parts have damn good reason to be sensitive about things, particularly things having to do with sex and violence.
the story I mean to tell is as follows. not long ago, a sixteen year old kid named Joey signed up to be one of my street team captains. a few weeks back he started hitting the pavement to splatter his Denver suburb with Phineas stickers and distribute those special edition Judas review copies to anybody who wanted to exercise his or her first amendment right to free speech and thereby grab hold of a free book. Joey was motivated by two pretty simple factors… he loved the books, and the characters spoke to him. and because Joey is in high school, when trying to spread the word of Poe he naturally gravitated to the environment he understands best and began handing out my books to his fellow students. and after passing out twenty or so copies of kiss me, judas to other like-minded kids who were presumably just happy to see a free book coming their way, young Joey was summoned yesterday to the principal’s office, where his last few copies of kiss me, judas and his personal copy of Hell’s Half Acre were rudely seized. and confiscated by the man. Joey was then told in no uncertain terms that if he passed out any more books, he would be suspended.
this shit is not right, people. nor is there any acceptable excuse for it. I don’t care where anybody lives. just because Joey and his friends eat breakfast within a fifty mile radius of the most horrifying bloody tragedy to ever go down on an American high school campus, they should not be expected to forfeit their first amendment rights.
in 1789, when James Madison originally proposed his first amendment to the house and senate, he phrased it thus: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”
And in this the age of deception, of government-sponsored war crimes, of gross media betrayal and Orwellian homeland security, Madison’s words ring like a church bell. and the survival of his ideals have never been more critically entwined with our own.
fight the power.
-wcb
professor Bob
@ 12:41 am Comments (11)if any of you get a chance to hit a reading, please do. and bring a posse. I recommend highly the reading clevenger and I will do together oct 15 at the phoenix in SF.. anyway, the friday before last we had a little book release party slash reading, with the wine flowing free and DJ sickly spinning everything from the Logan’s Run soundtrack to Tom Waits. The place was packed and a damn good time was had by all. I read the opening chapter of Hell’s Half Acre. everybody seemed to dig it so I was going to do an encore, which I’ve never done before, maybe read something from p dreadful or judas, but the guy who brought the mic had vanished into the ether. so I kicked back with penelope and clevenger and a tall drink and reminded myself that damn, I have a new book out. and it feels pretty freaking good. there are over 200 copies of the special edition black judas ARCs floating around town, so occasionally I see somebody hunched over in a coffeeshop, getting the word of Phineas. amazing. anyway, some nice reviews have appeared the last week or so, and one kind of nasty one, all of which we will provide links to soon, and I apologize for not posting lately as I have kind of got sucked into the forum.. and that reminds me: I will post the accidental porn story sooner than later. but will bury it in the velvet somewhere, because I’m pretty sure my mother reads this page.. in the meantime, I did a tasty online interview the other day with a brother named Bob who operates a sweet bare bones web zine called professor barnhardt’s journal.
religiously,
-wcb
goodnight, Rachel
9/8/2004 @ 2:38 pm Comments (10)so today marks the end of the Rachel experiment, the rebirth of lost work in the form of an online serial novella… with just enough last minute eyeballs to the sun polishing and retrofitting to put me under the gun each week in terms of keeping my shit together. in truth, what you’ve seen here is about 99 percent untouched original text, as composed some seven years back. I just moved some furniture around and did some dusting, put some fresh mints on the pillows.. all said, it was fun as hell and it seemed to me the velvet family took to it like dogs on a freshly killed rabbit. which puts me in mind to try it again in the near dark future.. for now, take one last walk with Travis and Rachel in chapter 7- crucible -just be careful not to step in anything. anything that leaves a visible stain that is. and if you’re scratching your melon like a stranger in a strange land, chapter 1 can be found by visiting the misc section along the menu to the left.
sex and monkeys,
-wcb