PEO
PLE
DON’T
READ

ongoing drops

Write little and get lost in the noise, write a lot and be read by no one. But is it true? I feel like the idea that “people don’t read” –still vastly popular in the creative world– is nothing but a lazy misunderstanding. Text will stop being a problem the moment you embrace what’s being said. Want to show the weight of a misogynist saying? Try hanging it from a ceiling. Want to enhance the power of personal stories? Have people writing their own. Want to denounce the misconception of the “feminazi” insult? Have it built across a wall and then ask people to destroy it. Almost anything is possible in art; use it right and you’ll say a lot.

People don’t read boring stuff. This does not mean don’t write. This means write better.

One of the assumptions behind the magazine was that advertising overtly and covertly castrates content. Therefore, Fact would take no advertising. We wanted to be perfectly free to rough up powerful and sacrosanct institutions when they deserved roughing up, and free to explore topics considered taboo by most other magazines and the big advertisers that support them.

A second assumption was that Fact would be a professional magazine, one that profited from the skills of modern journalism. Manuscripts, if unclear, would be made clear—“translated into English,” as H.L. Mencken used to say. Formless, discursive manuscripts, would be organized, preferably around one central theme. Manuscripts written ploddingly would be brightened up and tightened up.

"It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little…have few verbal means. Eloquence…thinking in words…is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech."

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“The psychologist Frank Beach, who submitted to Kinsey’s questioning, reported: ‘It wasn’t Have you ever?, it was When did you last make love to a pig? You said Never! OK – but he had you hooked if you were a pig lover.”

“Curiosity and the human desire to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate phenomena have motivated humanity's development of science, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other fields of knowledge.”