Hippies, Anarchists
August 3, 2008
It seems like many of the bookstores that might want to carry something like Birkensnake are hippie anarchist collective bookstores. I don’t have anything against hippie anarchist collective bookstores — I volunteered at one briefly myself — but is a slender volume of weird and somewhat incomprehensible fiction really a hippie/anarchist object? Because it’s hand-bound or something?
At the bookstore where I was a hippie anarchist collectivite, we had a fiction section. It was in the far corner of the store, on the bottom shelf. I noticed that nobody ever went there. Really, I’m pretty sure I never saw a single person looking at that section. Granted, I didn’t work there very often or for very long.
Clearly Donald Trump has no reason to be interested in Birkensnake. It costs four dollars. I am just wondering why certain kinds of apparently apolitical objects are so closely tied to certain politics.
Is it just because it’s cheap? If we made ourselves fancy business cards and wore fancy clothes and went to certain kinds of parties, in mansions for example, and priced Birkensnake seven hundred dollars and put each one in a fancy archival slipcover, would it then be sold in a totally different kind of store and read by totally different people? Would those people like it more or less than the hippie and anarchist people will like it? Does being rich give you access to a wider variety of objects, or, once culture has finished messing with the marketplace, does it just give you access to a different set of objects?
This is the kind of thing that Jesse Ruocco will know.
August 6th, 2008 at 9:59 am
This is interesting, because I’ve actually always thought of you as a hippie anarchist. Are you saying you’re not? I mean, Joanna certainly is. It only stands to reason that the object made by two hippie anarchists is a hippie anarchist object. Especially if they’ve “distracted” themselves with the details of production to such an extent that said object has become a more or less pure expression of the subconscious. Look back at all your Birkensnake posts. See anything–between the materials acquired, the mode of their acquisition, and the production itself–that strikes you as hippie anarchist? Now read the stories. See anything–between the dystopian fantasies and the undermining of traditional literary postures–that strikes you as hippie anarchist? Perhaps you’re just completely in denial about your identity. Perhaps this is a wake-up call. Perhaps it’s time to embrace your essential hippie anarchism.