The short version of what’s wrong is that Schlosser wants to talk about the toxic call-out culture that he says affects his teaching career. To do it, he held up a woman on Twitter who was saying nothing about him in particular or any single specific identifiable human being and said that she, identified by name and linked to, is the problem.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Why is it an example of toxic call-out culture that creates an aura of silence and fear for her to call out the presence of white patriarchal bias in a lot of what gets labeled”scientific thought”, but it’s not an example of toxic call-out culture for him to hold her up, call her specifically by name, and say, specifically, that she’s causing this problem?
There’s a serious double-standard at work here, and I am not going to be entertaining comments on this or the previous post from people who refuse to acknowledge it. You want your comment to be approved instead of deleted, you need to explain why you think what he did was cool and in no way hypocritical, and it needs to make sense.
Also, if anyone else wants to say that I’m playing identity politics, then you need to articulate a cogent reason why this disparity exists. Because I didn’t even say that it’s racism or sexism! I didn’t! I just pointed out what happened.
So if you’re looking at that and are jumping straight to “YOU ARE JUST PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS! EVERYTHING IS SEXISM AND RACISM WITH YOU PEOPLE!”… ask yourself why. Ask yourself how you got there, because I didn’t lead you there. You found yourself there on your own.
You looked at what was happening, and you saw something that made you think about sexism and racism… right before you went foaming at the mouth to scream that it wasn’t.
There’s this moment in Daredevil where Foggy says something like, “I can call myself Captain America but it doesn’t put wings on my head.” I had a moment when we watched that episode where I thought, “…but MCU Cap doesn’t have wings on his head. They’re just painted on the cowl,” and it annoyed me because it was one of the most solid connections between the TV series and the universe of the movies and it kind of came off like it wasn’t even a movie reference at all, but one to the familiar comic book character of Captain America.
Then the moment passed, and I realized: it probably was.
Captain America went into the ice 70 years ago. Before that, he was best known from his USO tour, the staged newsreels, movie serials, and—of course—the comic books they cranked out. The secret war against Hydra didn’t seem like it was in the public eye, so who knows how much footage of him in the tactical outfit Howard Stark designed was shown to the public at the time. Enough to counter the original image of him in the colorful pajamas?
It’s something interesting to think about. Did the U.S. government and/or the fictional counterpart of Marvel/Timely Comics ever revive the character in print? Maybe in the 60s, when they thought the country needed a symbol of unity to rally around? In real life, the fictional character was revived once before his Avengers debut at the height of the Red Scare as a jingoistic reactionary figure, an embarrassing misstep that had to be retconned as a government-made stand-in when a kinder, gentler Steve Rogers made it to print.
Imagine the possible parallels if Steve returned from the ice to find out that Captain America comic books have been used to sell the message of the month for decades… I imagine Steve’s friends would have used their influence to try to keep the political slant to a dull roar, but influence does fade.
Whatever the answers to these questions are, it’s more than possible that Foggy grew up reading comics about the Hitler-punching Cap with wings on his head. As much as real world comic fans gripe about the movie counterparts’ costumes not looking right, how weird would it be to have your own comic book hero pop up in real life and his costume’s wrong?
So, this post will contain some spoilers for Age of Ultron, which is why there’s a cut underneath this introductory blog is relatively new-ish and I have it cross-posting to a lot of different platforms to make it easier for my established readers to follow it wherever they’re used to following me. I’ve never hidden things beneath a cut on this blog before. My understanding is that the automated cross-posts will obey the cut. I’m going to be checking them out after I post this to try to catch them if they don’t. But in the event that some unwanted spoilers leak through and you see them before I catch it, sorry!
This is a post about trigger warnings and critical discourse in relationship to entertainment media. The intent here is to explain them to people who are under a mistaken impression about why people engage in these things. I don’t think this will do anything to sway the noisiest detractors, those who are less motivated by a quest for the truth than by a quest for a convenient political punching bag, but I think there’s probably a mass of people in the middle who don’t really understand what it’s all about, but they are definitely against censorship , so if someone claims to be speaking against censorship they’ll be inclined towards sympathy.
The thing is that neither trigger warnings nor critical analysis amount to censorship. If anything, attempts to scuttle them are closer to censorship. You can’t believe in the free exchange of information and opinions and fight against people freely exchanging information and opinions.
Anyway…
There’s a show I discovered on Netflix, after it was over and done with. It’s called Bomb Girls. It is a period piece about the workers at a Canadian munitions factory during World War II. I could say that I like this a lot and it would be a true statement, but I wouldn’t make a blanket statement of “I recommend this show, go watch it.” I would instead try to include some context and nuance to my recommendation.
There are reasons to do this for any piece of entertainment you’re recommending, because neither “quality” nor “enjoyability” are simple one dimensional objective quantities. Now, if you’re talking to a specific person or a specific audience where there are some broad things that are known or can be assumed about tastes, you don’t always have to spell out the specific nuance.
For instance, if I were to tell a family member or one of my best friends, “You should check out _____, I think you’ll like it,” I’m already taking on board what I know about them into the statement “I think you’ll like it.”
My older brother once told me, “I am not the target audience for anything described as a spiritual successor to The Sandman.” This was not a slam on The Sandman, just him speaking to his experiences with a certain swath of fantasy comics. He had tried enough of them and found that they weren’t for him that he wasn’t interested in sampling further. So, I take that on board when I’m making recommendations to him. If I don’t mention a comic to him because it fits that criteria, it’s not a statement on how much I appreciated it or what I think its quality is. I’m just taking into account his tastes.
Similarly, when I’m making general recommendations, I try to remember to relate them to other things that people might be familiar with. “If you enjoyed _______ and you’re looking for more things that _______ the way it did, then you might find this to be up your alley.” Stuff like that. I might also caution people, “If you’re looking for ________, you won’t find it here.” I don’t think I’ve ever said anything like,”If you’re getting bored with ________, this might not be to your tastes,” as that’s never been a major consideration for me, but I’m sure people have mentioned such in their reviews and recommendations.
The thing is, I don’t think anybody would reasonably look at things like these and conclude that there’s some kind of censorship at work or that anybody’s trying to influence/restrict the allowable content of work by praising things conditionally in ways that center on these specific elements.
To bring this back to Bomb Girls… well, I’m about to post a video that is one of my favorite scenes in the series. It’s a powerful scene. It’s not a scene I can recommend without nuance or context, though. See, it’s actually the juxtaposition of two different scenes, one of which includes homophobic violence directed at a lesbian couple. (Spoiler warning: They do survive.)
I know people who have experienced that kind of trauma and cannot have it shoved in their faces without a warning and the chance to either prepare or choose not to experience it without being triggered. Even if I didn’t, I know that there are such people.
I also know people who just… don’t want that sprung on them. Or don’t want to see it. They’ve seen too much of it in reality and in fiction and they either have to be in the right mood to see it, or they’re just done with it. Too many queer tragedies, not enough happy endings. They’re just not interested.
Now, the thing is, no one would look at a dude saying that he’s seen enough would-be successors to The Sandman to know that giving his time and money to others in that line would be a poor gamble and conclude, “SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS, NO ONE SHOULD MAKE IT?” No one would look at me making a review/recommendation that acknowledges that not everyone wants to see that and say, “SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO LIKE THIS?”
Some contrarian troll might crop up with, “But by writing off an entire sub-genre of work on the basis of a perceived association with another work, you are being close minded and might be missing out on works that deserve your attention!” or some such nonsense, but there wouldn’t be much vehemence to it.
But if I were to just post the video I’m talking about without this preface and preamble, only the words: “TRIGGER WARNING: HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE” in front of it… well, I’d get all that and more.
Even though the point of posting the video would be to say, “This is a really cool, really powerful scene in a show I really like,” the fact that I added this particular bit of nuance and context would be taken as a sign that I’m trying to censor or control the content, trying to control what people are allowed to make and what they’re allowed to like.
Here’s the video, by the way:
(If this doesn’t show up in a crosspost, click the source link for the original post.)
This is the actual use of Trigger Warnings: to respectfully allow people some choice of what content they will engage with, when, and on what terms. It’s not an act of censorship. It does not take control away from the creators of content nor the consumers. Rather, it allows the consumer to make an informed choice.
Arguments against them like “There are no warnings in real life!” are both wrong and wrong-headed. There are warnings in real life; they’re somewhat haphazardly implemented, but they’re there. We make an effort to warn people about everything from dips and bumps in the road to the level of violence and adult situations in a movie, not because no one should ever drive down an uneven road but because if you know the ups and downs are coming you can pass through them more safely.
That’s all a trigger warning is. Some people need them because of literal PTSD triggers. Some people simply use them to make an informed choice.
Now, let’s move past trigger warnings and talk about critical discourse. I like this show. I actually love it. But there are things about it that frustrate me. The fact that there’s only one character in the core ensemble who is The Gay Girl (e.g., tokenism) is part of that. The fact that her romantic attachments are mired in tragedy is part of that. The fact that a character who seems to be set up as gay in the first episode and who the canonically gay character Betty spends the series pining for to the point that Betty makes huge sacrifices for her happiness is part of that. The fact that these kinds of stories are told over and over and over again, without a lot of counterexamples, is part of that.
If I were to talk about this, as I’m doing now, I might be told, “But that’s realistic! You can’t complain about this because that’s the kind of thing that really happened! Queer people were forced to hide and subject to violence and legal penalties and bigotry and job discrimination! And Bomb Girls isn’t some fantasy wish fulfillment story! It’s about how hard life was during wartime for everybody! Everybody’s plotlines were full of hardship.”
And the thing is that not one of those points is wrong, per se, but none of them actually address what I’m talking about. It also ignores the fact that just because a tragic plotline is realistic doesn’t mean a happy plotline would have been unrealistic. Bad things happen in real life, but so do good things.
And even if you believe that Betty’s plotline was artistically exactly what the show needed to do…
What does that have to do with whether a person does or does not want to watch another retread of the same tragic lesbian tropes? Nothing, no more than someone who doesn’t want to read any more “mythic” style fantasy comics is a statement on the merit of those comics.
So often the reception this kind of critical discourse gets by people who don’t engage with their media like this amounts to, “YOU DON’T LIKE ANYTHING AND YOU DON’T THINK ANYBODY ELSE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO LIKE ANYTHING! YOU DON’T THINK [WOMEN/QUEER PEOPLE/ETC] SHOULD EVER BE ALLOWED TO BE SHOWN SUFFERING ANY ADVERSITY WHICH MEANS YOU THINK THEY’RE PRECIOUS FRAGILE SNOWFLAKES WHICH MEANS IT IS YOU WHO IS ______IST!”
But, man… even if somebody started watching Bomb Girls, saw which way the wind was blowing, and declared the show to be absolute trash (and I’m sure there are people who did this), that’s not actually what they’re saying. At all.
And it’s certainly not what everybody is saying, whenever they deal in a nuanced, contextual analysis of the content of a book or show. The idea that anyone who grapples with this kind of thing is inherently anti-fun or anti-art is just so strange to me, especially because the people who bash on this kind of criticism say things like, “I watch TV/read comics/play video games for ENTERTAINMENT. I don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of real-world issues every time I do that! It’s supposed to be ESCAPISM!”
Yeah, we get that.
So, can you understand why someone who deals with violence and discrimination and fear and isolation for being queer might not want to have to deal with those real-world issues when they’re just looking to be entertained?
State Attorney Marilyn Mosby stood up today and announced that the six officers involved in the homicide of Freddie Gray of Baltimore will be charged with this crime. Among the findings she revealed is the fact that an illegal “switchblade” that he reportedly carried was in fact a perfectly ordinary and perfectly legal knife, and was not found until after he was detained (thus cannot constitute probable cause for a search or arrest).
I’m seeing this fact and a few other key points being touted about the Twittersphere as an important aspect to the case, and I agree. It is important to document when officials charged with public safety and blessed with public trust lie to the public to protect themselves and each other. It is important to document deliberate falsehoods in this case as they indicate deliberation, if not premeditation for the crimes. It is important to document these lies because the truth is important.
But I worry.
I worry that the narrative will become—or perhaps in some corners is already becoming—“See? Freddie Gray did not deserve this treatment! This proves he died for no reason!”
No, in point of fact, it does not.
Because even if Freddie Gray had been carrying an illegal weapon, he did not deserve this treatment and he died for no reason.
He was arrested a mere five blocks from the precinct house. Less than half a mile. He was savagely beaten and then thrown into the back of a van with no padding, no safety restraints, no protection of any kind and taken on a forty minute joyride which served no other purpose except to slam him around inside the hard metal confines of the vehicle.
If his attackers did not intend to kill Mr. Gray, they certainly intended to injure him and they certainly displayed a gross disregard for his life.
In cases of police violence, we are told time and time again that we cannot judge officers for taking steps to protect themselves, for making life-and-death judgment calls in the heat of the moment. If we point out all the cases where suspects who fit one profile are taken in safely despite being heavily armed and belligerent versus the cases where suspects who fit another profile are shot repeatedly at the first sign—often imaginary—we’re told you’re not there, you can’t know what’s in their head.
Well, that hardly applies in this case. Half a dozen men against one man, broken, bleeding, and in handcuffs. Even laying aside the question of whether the force used to subdue him could be said to have been warranted (and forgive me for being dubious, given everything else we know), there is no “safety” or “in the moment judgment” that can excuse or justify what happened next.
So if we say that Freddie Gray didn’t deserve this brutal execution because he wasn’t carrying an illegal weapon, what we are saying is that people—at least certain people—do deserve this treatment for carrying an illegal weapon. That the actual rule of law, which prescribes that persons accused of a crime be detained, charged, and tried before punished, should not have been applied if Freddie had been breaking this law.
I’m going to say something that should not be controversial:
Beating people suspected of a crime into a pulp then throwing them into a metal box and slamming them around for upwards of half an hour to see what happens is not a legitimate function of a police department. It is not a legitimate function for a democratic state power to execute. It is not something that a nation that aspires to the loftier ideals espoused by the United States of America should be doing.
It doesn’t matter if the victim of a crime is also a criminal. The law does not and should not care. We should all be terrified of the idea that government agents can decide a person is a criminal and then decide that their rights are suspended on that basis.
Yet it happens.
It happens every day.
And a lot of us don’t notice, if only because our own knee-jerk judgments of who is and isn’t a criminal happens to match the determination being made by the police.
We have ways for determining criminality and processes for dealing with criminals. They are not perfect. They are not themselves perfectly free from brutality and bias at any level of their operation. But they are there, and they should not be ignored by people who are touting the concept of “rule of law”.
Freddie Gray didn’t deserve what happened to him, and he was killed for no reason.
This is true not because he was innocent, but because he was a human being and endowed with certain rights.
One of my favorite moments when I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier came when the sub-titular character was unmasked, and someone in the theater let out an exclamation of genuine surprise. I envy the person that experience. I really do. Same with the people who didn’t pick up that Anthony Mackie’s character was a high-flying superhero before the reveal.
And when I figure out the central mystery to a story before a big reveal, I feel great about it.
But not every story is a mystery, and I wouldn’t trade decades of comic fandom knowledge for not knowing who the Winter Soldier and Sam Wilson are before seeing it on the big screen.
And you know what? While I didn’t share in the experience of the people who were surprised, knowing who those people were didn’t diminish my enjoyment. It just changed the nature of it. My pleasure came from seeing how these familiar stories were pulled off this time.
And that’s something I think is often missing from our discussion about spoilers. The idea that knowing what’s going to happen diminishes the experience of hearing a story is a kind of strange and fairly modern idea. I mean, there came a point in time where Homer’s telling of the Trojan War became codified as “the official” one, but Homer himself was a performer, not a scribe. Do we think he told the story the same way each time? Do we think people edged away from him when he started up with that “RAGE!” spiel again because there was no point in hearing the story again if they already knew where it was going?
To imagine this requires us to ignore the fact that the story of the war with Troy was old when Homer was young. He might have increased its popularity, but it’s also likely that its permeation into his culture is why his telling became one of his best known works.
Of course, the historicity of Homer and the connection between the surviving written version of The Iliad and any such person is far from a settled question. But I think we have enough evidence to accept that people out there were singing of the rage of Achilles, and we can imagine one such person who was particularly successful at it and call this person Homer.
The point is that while there must of necessity have been a point in any Hellene’s life when they first heard of the rage of Achilles, the strength of Ajax, and the wiles of Odysseus, that point would not usually have been the last time they heard of these things, nor the one and only time they enjoyed them.
A few years ago, there was a raft of articles referring to a study that indicates that having a story spoiled may actually make it more enjoyable by in essence allowing us to sit back and just take the story as it comes. In the time since then, I have increasingly come around to this way of thinking.
I’ve also started to wonder if the disdain for spoilers isn’t tied to the idea that there is (or should be) a “real telling” of a story. The idea of “canon” to mean “the fixed, objective reality of What Really Happened in a fictional timeline” rather than “a body of work” is also a relatively new idea, one that probably dates back to the original Sherlockians trying to reconcile details that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had simply fired off and then forgotten about, but not much further in any concrete form, and one that has only really penetrated into the ranks of the storytellers themselves as young fans who grow up caring more about such continuity concerns become content producers themselves, and inspire another generation who cares about it even more…
I’ve seen people talking about a divide in fandom between people who see Canon as something to be kept, an immutable stone record that is mastered through memorizing and internalizing the minute arcana which makes it up, and those who see Canon as a set of building blocks and foundations to build on, to be mastered by exploration and analysis and creative rejiggering.
This divide is not intrinsically sexual, but is fairly heavily gendered in practice, as represented by the Geek Boy who quizzes Geek Girls about the trivia of the t-shirts they are wearing, while the same Geek Girls have folders full of fan art and fan fic.
The gender divide is not what interests me here, so much as how deeply entrenched the point of view of the Canon Keepers is and how it might be affecting the prevailing view of spoilers as, in effect, a crime against the art. Now, only the Sith deal in absolutes few things in life are black and white, so rather than describing Canon Keepers as people who believe there is absolutely one telling of a story, maybe I should try a more nuanced description: some tellings are official/real, and no others are. So you can accept the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the 616 comic universe and maybe some of the other versions as “real”, but for each “real version”, there is a single Approved Telling, and you have exactly one shot to see/hear it in the Approved Fashion.
The plot summary on Wikipedia, your excited co-worker at the next cubicle telling the person one cubicle over, the clever parody gifsets circulating on Tumblr… these are not the Approved Tellings, and they therefore diminish it by their existence.
In spelling out this speculation… and I should point out that much of the last two paragraphs are speculative… I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with the “carved in stone” approach to canon versus the “built from tinker toys” approach, nor with this potentially related approach to reading stories/seeing movies.
I’m just raising the question of where it comes from, in the interest of examining if it’s really necessary, on a person-by-person basis. I feel like some of us have just accepted the idea that spoilers spoil in the sense of ruining a movie.
You ever notice how the second time you watch a movie, you often catch a lot more than you did the first time? The genuinely clever lines, the little background details that show how much thought went into the worldbuilding and plot, stuff like that? This will always be the case, but I suspect based no my experience that you catch more of it when you’re also not trying to put together the larger details.
It’s true that I’ll only see a movie the first time once, but I also generally only see movies on the big screen once. If I want to get the most out of that opportunity, I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary. I don’t want to know all the twists. I don’t want to know all the jokes. I don’t want to know all the background details.
But I want to know the story, in the same way that an ancient Greek crowding around a poet singing on the street corner would know of the rage of Achilles.
If you think about it, it’s kind of weird that speculative fiction even exists as a genre. In a way, all fiction is speculative. If we weren’t imagining a world that is other than the one we know in some fashion, it wouldn’t be fiction.
But it goes beyond that, because once upon a time, there wasn’t a special word for fiction that was fanciful, fiction that included monsters and magic or even mechanical marvels. Those were all just part and parcel of the storyteller’s palette. The people who spun myths into tales were both entertainers and historians. There was no sharp, bright line. It took a long time for the idea of telling stories grounded in mundane reality to catch on to the point that we need a special word for stories that deal with glittering fantasticality.
This is perhaps even more true when it comes to poetry. So many poets throughout even recent history have worked in mythic realms, trafficking in fantastic or spiritual symbolism, incorporating folklore and legend into their verses. Poetry often deals heavily in metaphor, of course, so the argument about whether a given poem is really a work of fantasy or merely using fantasy to make a point while not actually telling a story could go on forever in some cases, if anybody felt it was worth their time to make it.
So we might ask ourselves: is there any need to label speculative poetry, genre poetry, SF/F poetry, or whatever you might want to call it?
Despite the case I just laid out, I would say that yes, it is a useful distinction to make… just not an absolute one. People tend to want to read things that speak to their interests, after all. We like what we like. If what you like is robots and artificial intelligences or mermaids and dragons—or robot dragons and artificially intelligent mermaids—then it might well be that speculative poetry would be right up your alley, even if most of the poetry you’ve encountered has done nothing for you.
I wouldn’t know how big and rich the world of speculative poetry is if not for the friendship of Elizabeth R. McClellan, who introduced me to it first through her participation in its fandom and then, increasingly, through her own career as a poet. I spent years watching from the fringes, convinced that this was all that I could do, that I didn’t have the right skills or anything to say.
That changed when I wrote “Institutional Memory“, a poem that started out as a short story that just wouldn’t come together. The time scale I wanted to capture was too grand, the point of view too diffuse. I couldn’t make it work as a story, so basically on a lark I tried it as a poem.
It worked, and I caught the bug. I’ve written easily a dozen solid poems since then, and sold four of them so far. The first sale was “Institutional Memory”. It was bought by the magazine arm of the SFPA, the Speculative Fiction Poetry Association. The fee wasn’t large in any objective sense, but it paid most of a year’s dues to the SFPA, which struck me as a fitting way to spend it.
Now, the SFPA isn’t like the similarly named SFWA, the Science Fiction& Fantasy Writer’s Association. Note that it’s the Poetry Association, not the Poet’s Association. This is not an organization for professionals but one for appreciators. In practice I suspect that most people who join the organization are or hope to be poets, and I also suspect the benefits of joining such an organization are more immediately clear if you are or hope to be a poet, but you don’t have to prove your right to be there. I had my first pro sale when I joined the SFPA, but that is not a requirement. There is no requirement. Nothing is required, everything is permitted.
Earlier in the year, I announced plans to promote speculative poetry through a website called The Every World Poetry Digest. My goal would be twofold: to let readers know what’s out there to read, and help poets learn what’s out there for them to sell to. I had planned on launching the project in earnest in May. That has been pushed back until I’m done with Angels of the Meanwhile, an unplanned and unexpected labor of love on behalf of Elizabeth R. McClellan, though it’s still coming.
In the meantime, I’m still going to do two things to promote my chosen field of poetry.
The first is to highlight the fact that the SFPA exists, it has open membership, and for as little as $15 a year you can be a member, get a quarterly PDF zine with poems from both career writers and rank neophytes and a chance to nominate for and vote on the Rhysling Awards (the equivalent of the SFWA’s Nebulas). The SFPA can be found online at http://www.sfpoetry.com/
The second is to mention that if you want to know some names you should be paying attention to in the genre poetry scene, you should seriously check out Angels of the Meanwhile. There are some serious big name, big time poets in there, along with some people I think will be well worth watching in the years to come. It’s by no means an exhaustive list; I’m not saying “Anyone who is anyone is in this collection.” But if you’re looking for a place to start, it should be a good one.
Actually, I’m going to do a third thing. I’m going to ask people to comment with the poem or two (or if you really can’t decide, three, but let’s keep things reasonable) that they would most recommend to others as a starting point if they’re interested in exploring the topic but not 100% sure where to look. It can be a classic work like Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” or one of Poe’s grim fancies, or something that came out more recently, but ideally it should be something that folks can find and read online for free, because I’m going to take them and collect them into a Speculative Poetry primer post of sorts.
There is a surprising (and growing) wealth of genre poetry on the internet, but one thing I am absolutely convinced of is that there are far more people who would read it than who, at current time, do. What I want to do—with this post, and with the Every World Poetry Digest—is give the world a signpost for finding it.
“I’m guessing rituals like weddings are important to you,” Jack said to me.
“…yes and no?” I said. “I actually don’t have a lot of patience with ritual for ritual’s sake. What means something to me is a ceremony that means something to the participants, that makes a statement more than ‘this is the phase of my life I’m in so I’m doing the thing that one does now’. A wedding, or a funeral, anything like that… it should be personal, like a piece of art. It should express something.”
“Is that why the idea makes you nervous? Because you’d have to stand up and say something?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not at all afraid to say things through art. The best way to say anything worth saying to anyone is by releasing a piece of art out into the world and then going to hide forever.”
