Macarism (Activity) & Zine News

Joe Yoga is getting ready to let loose the second issue of Amuze, “a monthly publication dedicated to trying to describe, through words, images, scotch tape, borrowed photocopiers, and the transcribed dreams, hopes, visions, and breakthroughs of its contributors, the underground arts scene of early Post-Millennial New York City.”

I recently contributed a few reappropriated Activities (like the below) and am excited to see how they’re cut & pasted into print history. I’m also happy to be involved in zine production only nominally; it’s nice to lay back and let someone else do the lifting for once. Although, for real, I have no idea where Joe finds the time. That dude plays a show almost every night.

Macarism (Activity)

Very few people realize this, but schadenfreude has an opposite. Not the direct antonym, as unhappiness in someone’s fortune is a sentiment so basic to human experience it made it into the seven elemental sins… but an emotional opposite, an inverted envy exploding outward in universal embrace. Derived from a transliteration of the Greek word for blessing, macarism can be found in the dictionary preceding a variation of the following entry: (rare) Joy in another’s happiness. There’s exists some confusion over whether this joy is passive, as in its emotional opposite, or requires an act of heartfelt congratulation. Clarification of this point, quite frankly, is something of a non-issue, as it’s only really come up as a sidebar on the Worthless Word of the Day Yahoo Group Listserv (Wednesday, August 4th – 2004) and isn’t likely to pop up again for some time. It was, however, what _______ had been feeling since the Hurricane – after the media fatigue and the breakup and post-traumatic shock: beautiful and transcendent, slightly dirty; unfolding him/herself out of bed every morning to mourning doves and rock and soul, unable to take even the slightest pleasure in the smallest slights. It was more than karma consciousness and less than tonsured beatitude, closer in fact to the polite sense of purpose shared by those forced to face the inevitable and survive.

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You can get a copy of Amuze at Penny’s Open Mic, which happens at the Theater Under St. Marks every Tuesday… or maybe also through Go Yoga Go!. Contribution information can be found here.

• where were you during the poetry wars? (pt. 2)