Lynne Tillman: New Editor of the Happy Hypocrite
18 December 2012
www.bookworks.org.uk

Book Works, Maria Fusco, and The Happy Hypocrite are pleased to announce Lynne Tillman as the first guest editor of The Happy Hypocrite. 

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic based in New York. Her fifth novel American Genius, A Comedy was published by Soft Skull Press. Other novels include Haunted Houses and No Lease on Life. Her most recent collection of short stories, her fourth, is Someday This Will Be Funny.

The Happy Hypocrite – Freedom, issue 6 edited by Lynne Tillman will be published by Book Works in Summer 2013. 

The Happy Hypocrite is now looking for submissions for this issue Freedom.

Submission deadline 1 March 2012

‘Freedom and liberty refer to an absence of undue restrictions and an opportunity to exercise one's rights and powers. Freedom emphasizes the opportunity given for the exercise of one's rights, powers, desires, or the like: freedom of speech or conscience; freedom of movement. Liberty, often interchanged with freedom, is also used to imply undue exercise of freedom: He took liberties with the text.’ – typical dictionary definition

As an American schoolchild, I learned that democracy and freedom walked hand in hand, and that desiring freedom was as natural to life as the sun’s rising and setting. In England, people don’t, I’m told, talk about freedom, especially individual freedom: They have it, so it’s a bit embarrassing to speak about, like showing off clean laundry in public; and it’s a demonstrable truth: English politicians don’t bruit about freedom the way US pols do, warning us we may lose it any minute.
Great notions speak us; they construct us. I use the words – freedom and liberty – and wonder at their enormity. I want and demand freedom, and also recognize the extent to which I don’t fully use my freedoms. In NYC, I am at liberty to say and do pretty much what I want. Still, I am doing, following, believing, accepting, submitting to a daily existence and system in ways I do not even know. Kafka wrote: ‘My education has damaged me in ways I do not know.’

Questions and conflicts about political and individual freedoms are as great as the concepts.  Minority vs majority rights. What about cultural relativism? OK, don’t scream ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater: but what speech, if any, shouldn’t be allowed? Does art fit into what should not be allowed? How does a psyche ‘absorb’ freedom? Are self-imposed limits necessarily inhibiting, and from what or toward what? When is a being ‘at liberty’ or ‘feeling free’? What about conscience, responsibility, and freedom? Do they form in relation to each other? Who judges the judgmental? Etcetera. Civic space and civility come to mind. A guy once stood in a doorway, smoking, refusing to move, so I couldn’t walk out the door of a café. No reason. He just stood there, blocking the door and me. Finally, I pushed him out of the way. Some obstacles can’t be pushed away, like the State and the law, and, as the life-joke goes: death and taxes. Still, Bunuel’s exterminating angel can also stand in that doorway, making legal restrictions irrelevant.  Let’s call it paralysis of the will.  

In the arts, media, writing, how do established, canonical, avant-garde ideas and dicta affect makers’ ability to invent, reshape, turn away? Or, what are the limits to imagining? Who is permitted to write/image what about whom?  Stuart Hall once said, ‘The time for essentialism is over.’ That was about 20 years ago, in a conference in NYC. From my POV, art and writing are still hampered by peculiar notions about who can and cannot speak. I think: Protect me from people who want to protect me; but more, save me from people who know what upsets ‘others.’  To paraphrase Theodor Adorno , for example, from his ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’ essay, propagating so-called ‘positive images’ will not undo racism; because an image’s meaning lies in the eye/mind of the beholder. The subject, not the object, needs an extreme make-over. 

I’m also thinking about Kuhn’s paradigm shifts; Goffman’s writings on stigma and presentation of self; Freud’s, Dickinson’s, Foucault’s, and Woolf’s ideas and writing. The history of dance and the shapes of chairs, of being cool, and much much more.

To return to Kafka, we don’t know what has damaged us. That’s what haunts me.  So I am drawn to what I don’t know, don’t comprehend; and, I also don’t understand what I think I do or what I have. Freedom is one such complicated idea. And, as this magazine is called The Happy Hypocrite, I think discussing freedom is especially fine in these pages. So much hypocrisy lives beside and inside the word. I want to explore that, also. Hypocrisy, a freedom? Let the comedy begin.

Lynne Tillman