SCV: I’m curious what’s at stake?
ADW: Everything. Our freedom, our ability to perceive, to address concerns and to bring attention to those issues that need to be explored.
SCV: Issues? What issues?
ADW: Our prosperity, our future, the legitimacy of what got us here in the first place and the idea that we have to infuse culture with new voices, attitudes that will force an examination of what is happening around us.
SCV: So how are you going about this?
ADW: It’s a collective effort by a consortium of thinkers and writers, like Robert Coover, interviews with Sam Lipsyte, Adrian Tomine that challenge how we think, what we choose to write, how culture is interpreted and the art of linguistics.
(I should also note this author’s read of Ann DeWitt’s interview with Lydia Millet (a charming and hilarious read on the (in)significance of celebrities in media and cultural memory had him laughing and even thinking…but I do wonder about the cow Miss DeWitt once owned called ‘Sweetmeat…’).
SCV: How do you guys finance all of this?
ADW: Columbia University helps, and we’re applying for non profit status. We’re sold for essentially cost at different vendors world wide.
SCV: Do I need to be a hipster to understand you?
ADW: No, I don’t think it matters.
SCV: Unless your focus is on irony…Are you an aesthete?
ADW: Aspiring. Yes, why not?
SCV: What does an aesthete do?
For the editorial record, I was not in NYC to read at the Gigantic launch. My tiny story was presented by friend and fellow writer Mike Topp.