Photo by nwhitford on Flickr.
I started Is Greater Than in late 2007 with little direction or ambition, as a response to the sadness and frustration I felt after the end of Punk Planet magazine, where I served as an intern and a reviews editor during its last year. Despite my brief tenure at the magazine, I had been a long-time reader, and it had a huge impact on my thinking. I credit Punk Planet with inspiring me to leave the soul-sucking customer service jobs I had held for 13 years, and pursue a writing and editing career. My only real hope with Is Greater Than was that I could in some small way try to carry on the legacy of politically-minded cultural coverage that Punk Planet excelled in.
As a result of that excessively vague mission, Is Greater Than has seen multiple permutations in the past four years, from a overtly political direction in the early days to its recent incarnation, in which politics still inform the coverage but the focus is more squarely on culture, literature, art, life and music.
1.
Once upon a time, the Little Mermaid came into Red Lobster. She came into Red Lobster sad and wobbly. Sad, because she missed her family and friends far away under the sea. Wobbly, because she was now an ex-Mermaid, and had still not quite gotten the hang of legs.
The Little Mermaid came into Red Lobster every Thursday. She never ordered anything, never requested a table. She just loitered in the lobby, by the aquariums, and sang to the lobsters. She had a good singing voice, but, still, customers complained. We told her she could sing to the lobsters all she wanted if she bought something—a Caesar salad, crab cakes, mozzarella cheese sticks, a cup of clam chowder—but she never did. I think she had money troubles. The market price of lobster was then around twenty-seven dollars a pound.
Our manager, Farnsworth, instituted a strict zero tolerance policy toward the Mermaid. He warned new hires about her during induction training, posted “For the Enjoyment of Customers Only” signs on the lobster tanks, stapled a poorly taken photo of the Mermaid to a corkboard in the staff room. But, if he wasn’t around, and no customers complained, we left the Mermaid alone, let her sing to the lobsters for as long as she wanted. I think she wrote the songs herself. They were extremely sad, and many of them seemed like they were meant to be duets, presumably with the lobsters, but when it came time for the lobsters to sing all we heard was silence. This made her sad songs even sadder.
Season 6 of famed fashion reality show Project Runway accepted into its contestants tall, blonde — and dare I say — bombshell Althea Harper. Hailing from Dayton Ohio, Harper was a recent college graduate when accepted onto the show. She was young and bubbly, but this designer also brought talent to match. On Project Runway she received much praise for her work from Tim Gunn, “Everyone [thinks] she’s only on the show because she’s a tall blonde beauty. But she’s extremely talented. She’s going to blow people away.” Others like celebrity guest judge Tommy Hilfiger declared Harper’s work to be “genius.”
These are popular times for novels set in a dystopic near-future America. This setting has understandably become a reflection of our collective disaffection as citizens, our anxieties, our angst, the society’s hypocrisies and contradictions. In Zazen, Vanessa Veselka’s first novel, the crumbling America is as frail as the tofu scramble her twenty-seven year old protagonist Della slings at the vegan-friendly diner. The President plans numerous wars, protestors self-combust, bombs explode in our cities, and people die easily. And there’s very little Della’s tattooed, hair-dyed, vegan, sex-party-loving friends can do to stem the tide of the American corporate war machine.
Paul M Davis