“—que combina Realismo Mágico con Prosa Gonzo Noir—”
Oh, God, it’s been a good long while since I properly waxed utopian about art, and the internet, and what the internet does to art, and making art, making the making of it more possible, and making it available to anyone anywhere anytime anyhow, and if nobody was going to get filthy Stephen King rich anymore, well, how many were under the old paradigm, come on, we are all ’zinesters now, famous for fifteen people, hooray. (Link to youthfully mawkish manifesto thankfully removed.) —I mean, who saw the pivot to video coming? The rise of streaming? Back in those heady early days, we’re talking season four of Halt and Catch Fire, who could possibly have thought the World Wide Web Consortium would write DRM into the very backbone of the internet?
But though I may not so much talk the talk these days, I do still walk it: everything here is free, of course, because, I mean, my God, it’s a blog, but so is everything at the city: I mean, I’ll sell you a ’zine, charging a bit of money to cover not the story, but the printing and the collating, the folding and the stapling and the postage, and I’ll sell you an ebook if you like, but the whole thing from the get-go’s been available for free, because. —Not entirely free, mind: copyright is claimed, but the rights reserved are limited, as defined by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which means: so long as you say where you got it, and don’t use it for any commercial purpose, and let anyone else do the same with whatever it is you make of it—you can make of it whatever you want.
Such as, for instance, a translation.
David (Artifacs) from Spain has gone and taken advantage of this to do precisely that, translating the whole thing into Cervantes’ mother tongue, offering up to the panhispanic community Ciudad de las Rosas: “Despierta…” and El Fugor del Día and, coming next month, En el Reino de la Buena Reina Dick. And it’s a decidedly odd feeling, knowing “my” words are out there now in a language I can’t read, in sentences I can barely even begin to fumble through before reaching for a dictionary—
Cuando suena el teléfono, las arrugadas mantas se sacuden y retuercen y escupen una mano. La mano busca a ciegas, encuentra el despertador y le da al botón de «Snooze». El teléfono vuelve a sonar. Aparece una cabeza, parpadeando, aturdida. El cabello es rubio recortado cerca del cráneo, con un par de mechones largos aquí y allá, teñidos de negro, lacios. El teléfono vuelve a sonar. Ella se echa sobre él, medio cayendo del futón, agarra el auricular. “Qué”, grita.
(Note: just because I do freely offer up some rights doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be open to selling some others, should a streaming netlet desperate for content want to talk about pivoting to video. Call me. I’ll drum up some people to talk to your people.)
