Having recently (as in this morning), finished Jonathan Safran Foer's, Eating Animals, I know find myself in the difficult position of caring about something and knowing that caring about something isn't enough. And so now things must be changed, actions taken, and so forth. Such is the power of stories.
A question, though, of a somewhat silly/serious nature. What about plants? They are alive, presumably, at the very least, a part of life, and we grow them and geneticize them and breed them and cut then down with loud, not particularly kindly looking, machines. Presumably, possibly, sometime in the future, we'll learn there's such a thing as plant consciousness. In fact, some people already have.
However it works, life feeds on life in order to stay alive.
The thing with plants, of course, is that, for most people, there's no belief, or comprehension, that plants feel pain the way that animals (such as us) experience pain. And so that means they get to die. Muahaha.
As I said, silly.
In other news, the Interstitial Folk had their Second Life Virtual World Salon last night. I was there, for a while, until my computer compunked. It was a polygonal affair, full of people' s names hovering over them so it was hard to see (probably there's a way to turn this off). Also, occasionally, the sound went wonky. But it was cool and quite different, if very much like any other reading in that authors read and people listened and, in the end, everyone danced. That last part might have been different. But it shouldn't be. There should always be dancing.
Today, a discussion of what Interstitialness, among other movements and manifesos within and without genres are all about. They talked a bit about it at the Salon. No conclusions were reached except that Interstitialness is not just about words, or stories, or any one particular genre, so much as it is about giving otherwise homeless artists a place that feels like home.
That and that there should be interstital t-shirts which read, "Loose Souls Doing Weird Things."
Or as Geoffrey Long puts it in today's discussion:
“A critic might look at an object we call teal and he’d sniff that it’s perfectly fine to classify it as blue. That’s his right, and it’s not our responsibility to stand on tables and rant that no, gawddamn it, it’s not blue it’s teal, but to show other people that it’s okay to be teal, if you like teal things more than blue things to come hang out with us, and if you’re interested in making teal things here is a list of resources for making teal things and a host of opportunities to share teal things with other fans of teal things – and in so doing, hopefully make new fans of teal things who might previously have only thought blue things were possible.”
That sounds about right.
Happy Tuesday, readers. Do something loose and weird. Think about your food. Wear more teal. You get the idea.
ttfn.
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