another open letter. this time re: takedown of draft magazine from amazon yesterday. started with a typical redshill-style coercive antic executed by an upstart button hero and was followed by a more professional ‘doubling down’ by mauren after i’d replied such essentially editorial decisons will result in my taking down all draft issues as a result.

hope this is found enlightening for many.

Hi Mauren,

so I regard your email as being the ‘official’ confirmation of Vaisakh’s earlier decision to block the draft literary magazine issue from being available for sale on Amazon by a higher instance within the Amazon framework? Is this reading correct?

As I clarified earlier, there hasn’t been an issue for many years with this. All I have done is tweak commas and republish the ‘culprit’. What changed?

As to your ‘guidelines’ as such – well, I have to say as long as it isn’t stated what specifically triggered the alarm bells – what is it? the dwarves offering sweets to the goddess, her not wearing any pants, the hideous cretins imprisoned between her legs in an earth buried trail emanating from the horizon, the ghostly fun fair without humans entertained in it whatsoever? – I do not feel confident publishing anything anymore in the future with you guys. Most of the things I know and say can be ‘bent’ to infringing empty ‘guidelines’ if taken out of intellectual discourse that is art and fiction. If sticklers and hypocrites are at work hiding behind their pathetic buttons.

Mind you – you didn’t have a problem listing a publication that was specifically produced as ‘pornography’ (Rear Entry by Eros Comix / Fantagraphics) as apparently having been authored by me – even though I have only been contributing with 5 pages as a graphic novel ‘illustrator’ (authored anonymously by an ex-girlfriend) and it has de-facto been authored – uncredited, as editor in chief – by Michael Dowers. And I’m certain this hasn’t changed at all. Listing is still up and deceiving just fine, lol. (And I don’t have a problem if credits are adjusted and depicted accurately for listings as this to be available on Amazon.)

Which is to say while you make a fuzz about first class artwork that is not at all considered ‘pornographic’ by anyone with a fine art education (slandering it insinuatingly, not daring to do it explicitly, as if it wasn’t clear to anyone how professionally and considerately this artwork has been created) – you turn a blind eye on the really important things such as those of copyright and credits.

And here comes the greatest irony of our present discourse – the plot twist that only those who read with a pure heart were able to see from the get-go – pieces of art such as this (as well as other artworks along those borderlines using people’s buried anxieties and desires, stirring psychological undercurrents both of vileness and goodness) raise precisely the entire issue of child abuse and women objectification – opening wide the darkest abyss – in a literary context that has the full backing of professional psychology.

Wouldn’t you then call this present head-slapping episode ‘hypocrisy’ by human standards and ‘professional misconduct’ by intellectual ones? What is an author of literary fiction today if they’re lectured by rogue unprofessionalism pretending to uphold ‘content guidelines’ while in reality they’re with self-righteous impunity enforcing extremely serious censorship of creative expression and thus partaining editorial license to an independent author’s creative work?

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