Slick vs. Pulp
Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—
Q: What is the difference between a slick magazine and a pulp magazine?
A: The paper.
A pulp magazine, the paper is coarse. Cheap. It has text printed on it, not illustrations.
Readers are interested in the stories. The content.
A slick magazine has coated paper. So the four-color ads come out right.
A magazine with ads, the sponsors of the ads control the content of the magazine. Most of the stories are nonfiction. That is, fact.
But not all the facts.
And some facts are stressed while other facts are barely mentioned.
That is, nonfiction is fiction.
Time magazine is the “People” section of Time magazine, which is People magazine. Which is Confidential magazine.
Q: Philip Wylie said all American advertising is designed to ask the question, “Madame, are you a good lay?”
A: “What sort of a man reads Playboy?”
Mohammad Atta, protesting white women.
Mohammad Atta, jacking off to pictures of white women.
Take that, you slut!
`The pulp novel gives the real escape. A man walking on the beach, writing, in his head. As he pleases.
Claude Levi-Strauss ends the last chapter of Elementary Structures of Kinship,
At either end of the earth and at both extremes of time, the Sumerian myth of the golden age and the Andaman myth of the future life correspond, the former placing the end of primitive happiness at a time when the confusion of language made words into common property, the latter describing the bliss of the hereafter as a heaven where women will no longer be exchanged, i.e., removing to an equally unattainable past or future the joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself.
I make cat’s cradles out of cobwebs.
The Melanesian gambit.
Cargo Cult natives in Port Moresby, waiting for a Gooney Bird to land, full of cases of Franco-American spaghetti and Timex watches.
“Unidentified aircraft, you are cleared to land.”
Q: While the Mantovani Orchestra plays the theme from Mondo Cane, “More.”
A: Shortage of after-dinner mints in
That’s the plot. I drive around visiting archeological sites.
The characters are me and Brenda, our boys, their wives and children, my coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult.
The setting is
the real
The theme is vocation and career in conflict.
How do you do the best work you are capable of in a world that is hostile and indifferent to your best?
Q: Haven’t you written this before?
A: Again and again.
Johnny One-Note. When he quit playing, Thelonious Monk sounded like he did in 1939.