Mrs. Robert Horton’s blog

Feeling rather Rotten

nobody@vox.com(Mrs. Robert Horton) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:31:10 -0700

You, you're a fan of zombies (and who isn't?), gore (Al or otherwise), U. S. Presidents, history, westerns—and damn good writing, yes?

Well, you need to add this title to your summer reading list. And read it.

Here’s a rave review of Robert Horton's brand new comic book, Rotten, which is available NOW at a comic book store near you—yes, near you!

http://www.fangoria.com/features/comic-screams/55-blood-soaked-pullbox/2622-rotten-1-comic-review.html

http://roberthorton.wordpress.com/rotten/

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Dan Cameron's Letter to Prospect.1 Volunteers

nobody@vox.com(Mrs. Robert Horton) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:02:32 -0700

Dear Prospect.1 Volunteer,

I’d like to open this letter by saying that although Prospect.1 closed two full months ago, and for some of you may be mostly a memory, it continues to be an essential part of my daily life. That is because with each week that passes, I continue to hear from people who saw the biennial or read about it, people who can’t wait to visit New Orleans or who can’t wait to return. These essential messages of hope and support serve to remind me why I got involved in this undertaking more than three years ago. In the American contemporary art world, and on an international level, New Orleans is now part of the map to a degree that has never happened before. Our mission going forward is to keep that level of recognition growing, so that Prospect.2 captures even more people’s imaginations, and draws twice the number of people to our wonderful city than the first one did.

As you may be aware, the transition to post-Prospect.1 matters has not been as smooth as we all would have liked. Some shortfalls in our fundraising, along with some overages in our expenses, resulted in a tense couple of months, during which it was not entirely certain that we’d be able to pay all our bills and keep going forward. This is probably every founding director’s nightmare – the fear that an artistically successful project can turn unsuccessful overnight, due to the economics involved. But because of the heroic job that that our Board of Directors has done raising funds and negotiating with creditors since the beginning of the year, I’m both incredibly happy and deeply relieved to be able to tell you that it is beginning to look like we will be able to make some public announcements about Prospect.2 before summer is underway.

However, before the transition from P.1 to P.2 can become a reality, there are a few important things I’ve been meaning to do, none of which is more important than expressing the gratitude I feel for your essential part in making Prospect.1 a success. No matter whom I talk to about Prospect.1, from colleagues to museum directors to visitors from overseas, everybody has had the highest praise for the volunteers. Making people feel welcome, helping track attendance, telling our guests about the artists in P.1, and giving a helping hand to the artists themselves – these details helped make Prospect.1 so special for thousands of visitors, and you’re the one who made that a reality.

Of course, we were all unbelievably fortunate to have had such a fantastic team to coordinate the hundreds of volunteers who gave of themselves so unselfishly. Aimee Farnet Siegel, John D’Addario, Brian Knighten, and Sarina Mohan were nothing short of remarkable at their jobs, and I’m sure you share with me a deep gratitude for their hard work and dedication. But in the end, you were the ones who made the biggest difference, because you pledged your time and energy to something that was largely an unknown quantity, and you did it out of a love of New Orleans. If it was possible to do so, there’s nothing I’d enjoy so much as taking each one of you out for a drink, so I could express these feelings in person. Unfortunately, since neither my wallet nor my liver is up to that challenge, I’ll have to make do with the next best thing, which is a letter addressed to each one of you individually, but written collectively.

I hope you will join me in imagining for just a moment that over the coming years, Prospect New Orleans is able to grow and become America’s biennial, and to continue to thrive long after I’ve left the scene. Should those dreams indeed come to fruition, I believe people will look back and wonder who it was that made all this possible – not who was on the staff, or even who the artists were, but who were those hundreds of generous citizens who, back in 2008, took it upon themselves to make sure Prospect.1 was a success, and never asked for a penny in return? If that day ever comes – and I honestly believe it will -- the magnitude of your contribution will finally be recognized. In the meantime, I hope you’ll settle for this heartfelt message of gratitude from me, because I can assure you that if you hadn’t come to our aid when we needed it most, this never could ever have happened.

I look forward to seeing you all at JazzFest next month, and with luck, at Prospect.2 next year.

With my very warmest regards,

Dan Cameron

Founding Director, Prospect.1 New Orleans

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The “Ic” Factor from the New Yorker

nobody@vox.com(Mrs. Robert Horton) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:02:07 -0800

by Hendrik Hertzberg August 7, 2006

What is the name of a certain political party in the United States—not the one which controls the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government but the other one, which doesn’t? The question is a small one, to be sure: a minor irritation, a wee gnat compared to such red-clawed, sharp-toothed horrors as the health-care mess and the budget deficit, to say nothing of Iraq and Lebanon. But it has been around longer than any of them, and, annoyingly, it won’t go away.

Last week, the gnat was buzzing at a high altitude. An e-mail from none other than “President George W. Bush,” arriving last Monday morning in millions of in-boxes, hinted strongly at where the Commander-in-Chief stands on the name issue. To wit:

The Democrat Party has a clear record when it comes to taxes.

And:

Nothing threatens our hard-won reforms and economic prosperity more than a Democrat victory this November.

And:

The difference is clear: if you want the government in your pocket, vote Democrat.

An alternative view is that it’s called the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party itself takes this view, and many nonpartisan authorities agree. The American Heritage College Dictionary, for example, defines the noun “Democratic Party” as “One of the two major US political parties, owing its origin to a split in the Democratic-Republican Party under Andrew Jackson in 1828.” (It defines “Democrat n” as “A Democratic Party member” and “Democratic adj” as “Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party,” but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—“Democrat Party n” or “Democrat adj”.) Other dictionaries, and reference works generally, appear to be unanimous on these points. The broader literate public also comes down on the “Democratic” side, as indicated by frequency of usage. A Google search for “Democratic Party” yields around forty million hits. “Democrat Party” fetches fewer than two million.

There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.

The history of “Democrat Party” is hard to pin down with any precision, though etymologists have traced its use to as far back as the Harding Administration. According to William Safire, it got a boost in 1940 from Harold Stassen, the Republican Convention keynoter that year, who used it to signify disapproval of such less than fully democratic Democratic machine bosses as Frank Hague of Jersey City and Tom Pendergast of Kansas City. Senator Joseph McCarthy made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults, which served to dampen its popularity for a while. There was another spike in 1976, when grumpy, growly Bob Dole denounced “Democrat wars” (those were the days!) in his Vice-Presidential debate with Walter Mondale. Growth has been steady for the last couple of decades, and today we find ourselves in a golden age of anti-“ic”-ism.

In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.) The respectable conservative journals of opinion sprinkle the phrase around their Web sites but go light on it in their print editions. William F. Buckley, Jr., the Miss Manners cum Dr. Johnson of modern conservatism, dealt with the question in a 2000 column in National Review, the magazine he had founded forty-five years before. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” Buckley began.

Dear Joe McCarthy used to do that, and received a rebuke from this at-the-time 24-year-old. It has the effect of injecting politics into language, and that should be avoided. Granted there are diffculties, as when one desires to describe a “democratic” politician, and is jolted by possible ambiguity.

But English does that to us all the time, and it’s our job to get the correct meaning transmitted without contorting the language.

The job of politicians, however, is different, and among those of the Republican persuasion “Democrat Party” is now nearly universal. This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled “Words That Work”—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of “ic”s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.

In days gone by, the anti-“ic” tic tended to be reined in at the Presidential level. Ronald Reagan never used it in polite company, and George Bush père was too well brought up to use the truncated version of the out party’s name more than sparingly. Not so Bush fils—and not just in e-mails sent to the Party faithful, which he obviously never reads, let alone writes. “It’s time for the leadership in the Democrat Party to start laying out ideas,” he said a few weeks ago, using his own personal mouth. “The Democrat Party showed its true colors during the tax debate,” he said a few months before that. “Nobody from the Democrat Party has actually stood up and called for actually getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program,” he said a week before that. What he meant is anybody’s guess, but his bad manners were impossible to miss. Hard as it is to believe from this distance in time, George W. Bush came to office promising to “change the tone.” That he has certainly done. But, as with so much else, it hasn’t worked out quite the way he promised.

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