The Importance of Art

Poetry

AMID the flurries of ideology and politics bombarding us from all sides on a daily-no-hourly basis, we’d like to emphasize that for us (for all we know only for us) nothing matters in the realm of letters but the quality and passion of the ART. All the ideological intellectual political debates and hates raging to and fro mean nothing in the face of the reality of art.

It’s with this mindset that we offer an incredible reading– captured on video– by arts writer and poet D.C. Miller: “My Behaviour.” Available now at our Open Mic feature. Intelligence combined with passion. To be able to present such moments is what makes this modest project worthwhile.
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(REMINDER: The 3–D Short Story debuts at this site June 6. Don’t miss it!)
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(Art: “Visions of the Knight Tondal” by Simon Marmion.)

The Battle Over Speech 2018

Controversy

Which side are YOU on?

The BATTLE over freedom of speech in America is heating up– and New Pop Lit is in the middle of it.

AT our New Pop Lit News blog we’ve been covering the squelching of speech; the censoring, banning, and blackballing of writers occurring RIGHT NOW across the internet.

Three recent articles:

-A controversial Report about editors censoring, or apologizing for, writers at an Ohio State journal and at other venues.

-A Report about the removal of a Junot Diaz podcast from a book-world site, and the rationale behind this.

-A Report about the media frenzy generated by anonymous accusations against another prominent author, Jay Asher.

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FURTHER, to exhibit our belief that any topic is fair game for the talented writer, we’re reviving our Open Mic with an audio reading by D.C. Miller of his strange, perplexing, and provocative poem, “Antifa Whore.”

We’re out to have fun– but every so often we’ll test the envelope. To misquote a critic, we’re diet edgy.

(But we also want people to know what side we’re on where freedom of expression is concerned.)
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(Art: “The Brawl” by Ernest Meissonier.)

Edge Culture, Sharper Literature

Announcement

A REMINDER that when we choose to we can push the edges of the usual, if not the acceptable, as far as anyone, due to our underground roots and DIY from-the-bottom viewpoint on all things cultural.

AS EXAMPLE we have our recently-posted feature story, “Cat Doctor” by mysterious on-the-arts-margins D.C. Miller, holding a mirror up to the clean and smug of today’s approved intellectual world.

THEN there’s our newly-placed book review of a new work by indie press figure Tony Nesca at our book chat blog.

FINALLY we have our ongoing Open Mic, with a reading of a striking poem by Brian Eckert along with other dynamic spoken word performances– with more to come.
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(Art: “Accolade” by Edmund Blair Leighton.)

Fiction: The Dating Game Part Two

Pop Lit Fiction

THE SECOND story in our look at today’s dating scene is a much darker animal: “Cat Doctor” by D.C. Miller. Ostensibly a response to The New Yorker‘s recent Kristen Roupenian story “Cat Person,” it’s more than that– it’s a look at the malaise of the West’s current intellectual class. People who believe in nothing– not even themselves. Whose ideological inanities, post-conceptual art and postmodern literature are an expression of nothing. Representations of the void at the center of their lives. A world in which the villains aren’t men or women, but everyone.

Appropriately, the story is set in Berlin, a city forever on the cutting edge of the end of Western civilization. Last stop before the nightmare of gotterdammerung and oblivion.

It was a catchy statement, and she liked it, but she wasn’t certain where to take it, whether it was true or not, and even if it was, what it would imply. She heard the sound of someone sighing audibly, like an echo from another room, and for a moment felt confused, before she realized it was her.

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IN THE FACE of such a pessimistic, albeit truthful, examination of relations between men and women, of ideas and culture, we remain optimists. We believe the culture will turn over because it has to turn over– it’s at a dead end, with nowhere to go but to scrap the present and embrace another direction.
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(Featured painting: “The Night” by Max Beckmann. Other: “Sjalusi i Badet” by Edvard Munch.)

A New Kind of Horror

Pop Lit Fiction

MONSTERS AND GOBLINS are products of the imagination. Reflections of our irrational minds.

What happens in an electronic world which overstimulates the brain to ever-higher levels of panic and hysteria? When media infiltrates our every waking and sleeping thought?

THESE QUESTIONS and others are raised in D.C. Miller’s intense, pop-tinged speculative novel, Dracula Rules the World and Mark Zuckerberg Is His Son. With his permission we’re able to present, in time for the mad pagan holiday of Halloween, five excerpts from the book.

Are the monsters inside us– or outside in the world?

Caught in the same chain of spaces, back and forth, between my apartment and the office, always facing a screen, as if I was trying to outstare it, it had gradually become unclear when I was inside the headset and when I was outside it.

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(Painting: “Vampire” by Edvard Munch.)