New Contrast's 200th Edition. Story: "Don't Cause Trouble."

New Contrast's 200th edition, which has a story of mine, "Don't Cause Trouble," about a retired Navy/airline pilot who goes on safari in Zimbabwe and finds a new, more meaningful life there is now out. Digital edition only 50 rand. As Alfred E. Newmans says in Mad Magazine--"Cheap!" About $2.75. New Contrast is South Africa's oldest literary magazine and has published Nobel laureates, which is pretty good company to be in, I suppose.

Also, I recommend that those who are fed up with the political orthodoxy of modern publishing subscribe to The Heresy Press, which is a reaction to the madness in publishing in the U.S. today, things like only Native Americans can write about topics that are Native American; no people of a race different from the writer's; nothing that might offend a group, racial or religious. (I think there are readers, and viewers, who can make up their own minds about what they like. "Breaking Bad," A Clockwork Orange are masterpieces, and not too many good people in them. An intelligent person understands that people can do evil things, but that that doesn't mean they are influenced by their evil acts. Their evil acts often reveal truths about human nature.) Using the present logic of publishers today, which fear offending a reader, or that that the characters don't reflect the ethnicity or gender of the writer of a work, scratch Madam Bovary, Moll Flanders, and Anna Karenina, which are all novels about women written by white men. The Hershey Press has a rejection contest in which agents and editors reject works because it didn't conform to political orthodoxy. Check it out. The Press wants to see the most absurd reasons for the rejection of a work. "If your novel about Native Americans has the name of a writer who isn't, I can't represent you." That's nutty. Has writing really become more about the writer than the work? Too often, probably. The critic Harold Bloom lambasted this, and, in return, many threw his criticisms back at him, that he was out of touch. Not for me, he wasn't. 

I suppose in acting, only gays can play gays, which makes me wonder, What is acting about if this is the case, or writing, if the imagination is neutered by political orthodoxy? So what if a woman writes from a man's point of view? I don't care. It's only the story that matters, not the writer. See previous post, “Is It Okay to Like Art by Bad People?” Published in The Atlantic, which is sort of related to all this nonsense of the artist being at the center of the work. My story in New Contrast was rejected by a few American magazines. I suppose, because it had Africans who didn't come off in the way the present political orthodoxy has of Africans, that had something to do with it. Oh, the editor who accepted my story is, well, a black African. Now isn't that ironic?

Because publishing and art have kowtowed to political orthodoxy, there is, of course, a reaction to that orthodoxy, which creates opportunities for writers.