Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

The Great Work.

The time my mother slapped me?

I was a junior in high school. Seventeen? Maybe. I don’t remember what it was I wasn’t to be allowed to have done, but I was complaining about it, bitterly, vociferously, rounding it out with the rising plaint of it just isn’t fair!

Life isn’t fair, she said, exasperated.

That’s no excuse! I snapped.

Pop!

What underpins all of the above is the idea of moral expectation. Fantasy, unlike science fiction, relies on a moral universe: it is less an argument with the universe than a sermon on the way things should be, a belief that the universe should yield to moral precepts.

—Farah Mendlesohn

Which isn’t what happened at all. —Oh, I was complaining about something; I was a teenager. And she’d told me more than once (but not that much more) that life just isn’t fair. And I wanted to say something in response, of course I did; I was a teenager. But if I ever managed to mutter anything at all I doubt it was so pithy. No, the time she slapped me I don’t even remember what she said, or I said. I just remember standing there, in the kitchen of the farmhouse outside of Chicago, the sting, the vague sick flutter in my belly and the half-swallowed grin of embarrassment, the acknowledgement that you know I’d probably deserved what I’d just got, but.

So I lied, just now. —But you know what they say about writers.

I’m not about to talk about it over there; over there, there’s whole words I can’t even spell out for fear of breaking—something. (Like the song says, as soon as you say it out loud they will leave you.) —But I have to talk about it somewhere. When I started to write it it was ten years ago and what we called the thing it was then was completely different than the thing we call by that name now. Used to be it was Eddi and the Fey concert T-shirts; now it’s tramp-stamped werewolves, and is that a bad thing? A good thing? A class thing? A get-off-my-lawn thing? Actually maybe not a different thing at all? —I don’t know, but I think maybe something got written out from under my feet, and it might be a good idea to figure out what it was before I land.

—And also there’s Mendlesohn, and Clute; Clute and Mendlesohn.

Which is not to say they’re wrong, my wanting to hash it all out like I want to. I mean, of course they’re wrong; they’re working with models. All models are wrong. But some are useful, and I haven’t yet figured out whether, or which.

Hence, the Great Work. Limned and primed.

—Filed 5568 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comment.

Gloriosky—!

Oh, I see—oh, I get it—

Though she’s still a little stronger on the see it than the get it. We’re working on that. —Taran Jack Manley, one year and one day old, at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

—Filed 5830 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

Free jazz

Never should have played her that Albert Ayler song.

—Filed 5888 days ago to Indulgences; Comment [2].

T-shirts can be decorated with text and/or pictures, and are sometimes used to advertise.

Not to knock Star Trek or nothin’, but Jayne’s T-shirts instantly made the future far more believable than any blandly newage councillor’s gown or ostentatiously homespun Jedi robes. It’s a future that keeps in mind clothing as she is worn: not just ceremonial formalwear and peasant uniforms, but everything in between, the knockabout workaday clothing you catch as you can, adorned with the serendipitious poetics only mass-produced things can provide. Proletarian chic, to re-appropriate a phrase.

I mention this because among the many things the Spouse does well in Dicebox is precisely this sort of practical imagineering: what do you wear when you don’t make your clothing yourself (or have it made for you)? What options are possible in a future of better fabrics and showier printing techniques?

All of which is a long-winded way of saying her ladies wear some fine T-shirts:

Now, the Spouse has done her bit to bring the future into the here-and-now by handrolling her own small-batch runs of T-shirts, but in addition to better fabrics and showier printing techniques, the future will bring us (has already brought) new ways of designing and distributing these quotidian goods. —I mean, basically, all of this has been a long-winded way of saying the Spouse has begun posting designs to Threadless.

You know how it works, right? Sign up for an account, then peruse the available designs; vote up the ones you like, vote down the ones you don’t, and those that are sufficiently juiced get printed as T-shirts and posters which you can then purchase and add to your quiver of mass-produced, knockabout, workaday poetics. And if you’ve ever looked at a page of Dicebox and said damn I want that shirt, add jemale to your watchlist and vote vote vote.

Fun T-shirt facts! A life cycle study of one T-shirt brand shows that the CO2 emissions from a T-shirt is about 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds)—including the growing of the cotton, manufacturing and wholesale distribution. The loss of natural habitat potential from the T-shirt is estimated to be 10.8 square meters (116 square feet).

—Filed 5993 days ago to Indulgences; Comment.

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