ON THE ROAD WITH EAP
by the Editor
With this issue, Exterminating Angel Press starts its journey as an independent publisher. We’ll publish two books in Fall of 2009, both of which started as conversations on the online magazine – JAM TODAY , a cookbook that stubbornly celebrates everyday life, and Mike Madrid ’s THE SUPERGIRLS, an analysis of comic book superheroines and how they’ve fared in American pop culture. Shortly after, Brian Griffith ’s CORRECTING JESUS: 2000 YEARS OF REVISING THE GOSPEL will come out – Brian’s writing it now, and you can watch it taking shape on the EAP site. Then, Alex Cox’s THE TAO OF INDEPENDENT FILM: A GUIDE TO UNDEPENDENT FILMMAKING. Alex is not just writing that one, he’s living it, too. I should know, since I'm living with him.
The last two years of EAP have been an experiment…an art project…a look at how we can work to change a world that looks increasingly in need of that change in whatever small ways we can. (I've tried to spell it out in What EAP Is , on the site.) And it seems to us that what we can join in working to change are the stories we tell ourselves as a culture. We’re idealists at EAP, but we don’t just think anything’s possible. So we’re as practical as we can be. And what we practical idealists have found, looking over the world, and discussing it among ourselves, is this: that the dominant cultural story we all assume to be true, the one we use as our default setting, just isn’t working anymore. There’s a lot of ferment going on, as a lot of new stories compete to be born. That’s fun. We want to get in there ourselves and propose our stories. We’d rather come up with new ways of looking at the world and new stories than waste our time complaining. And just saying that the old dominant story is a bad one is a waste of energy and time.
So: our new motto says it all. “Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.” At EAP, we’re going to keep the conversation going. We’re going to keep asking what the dominant story is. We’re going to look at how it unconsciously motivates us, sometimes to work against our own best interests. We’re going to bring it to light as much as we can.
And we’re going to suggest new stories. We’re going to look at the world around us in a whole different way. A different world is possible – but not if you keep looking out at it through just one window…and one all cracked and distorted at that.
Anyone who wants to come up with a Creative Solution for Practical Idealists is welcome. We’ll play with the ideas on the website, because all art is – or it should be – play, first and foremost. You have to be able to play to come up with new ideas. And out of what’s on the website, ideas will develop, and they’ll struggle to get born, and we’ll struggle, here at EAP, to publish them and push them out into the world. The Todblog is going to be about that uphill push, since I reckon the whole publishing venture’s going to take up most of my life anyway. Might as well write about it, too.
Meanwhile, we’re very pleased that Consortium Books will distribute Exterminating Angel Press. In fact, I’ve got to go to my new publisher’s meeting with them in January. In Minneapolis. My airport here in Oregon is probably going to be under eight foot of snow then, and theirs is bound to be. So that should make a dramatic blog.
Wish us luck. Watch the ideas grow. Feel free to join in, just email us at info@exterminatingangel.com — the more creative, and the more practical, your idea, your story, your whatever…the better. (In fact, for a look at a story like that, one that came over the electronic transom, check out GREENBEARD . The only way I can describe it is as an eighteenth century tale of high seas piracy, twenty first century banking, and alien abduction. Or similar.)
Welcome, welcome, welcome back.