Plague Circus Press
Plague Circus Press combines multiple centuries’ worth of tradition into an entirely new format.
The plague, better known as the Black Death, killed anywhere from a third to two-thirds of all Europeans. A third of the Middle Eastern population died. It took only seven years to accomplish this task. Not all bad things mean everything went horribly. With death and destruction came the dismantling of the feudal system in Medieval Europe. Serfs, those tied to the land, discovered they had power simply by being alive. Before, nobody gave a quarter, even an eighth of a shit, indeed I’d go so far as to say a sixteenth of a quarter of a shit whether a serf lived. After people became a precious commodity, suddenly they could command higher wages, move around, and humanity gained a degree of confidence. You love to see it. Personally, Beach Sloth historically has rooted for the underdog. So seeing a press embrace that, the mass death and the rebirth, that’s some Phoenix-level shit.
Circuses used to be more popular. They are not as much anymore. We have a lot more in the way of entertainment. Also, powerful figures dislike having community, and enjoy tearing communities apart. This predates the Internet, which is where you thought I was going, but no, I’m a wildcard, to quote the famed television philosophers “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Before mass distraction was created, whole cities, neighborhoods, and communities were cut up by highways. Robert Moses, famed highway engineer and general asshole, started this trend. Replicated across the United States, exported out from the original New York City environment, and later exported internationally, people saw tight-knit communities torn up by asphalt. Despite the dangers and the isolation that suburban sprawl brings- a much different variant than the normal isolation of rural life, which at least celebrates together and independence equally- this continues to happen. We had those circuses for more reasons than to hang around weirdos who grew beards out of their backsides. At some point, people managed to coexist despite differences. Thanks to the general spreading out of folks, there is no pretense for kindness; we can indulge in our cruelest passions, and those with money do exactly that.
Press represents a threat of knowledge. I have read a handful of tweets that argue that reading more than twenty books in a lifetime is a waste. Typically those are the same individuals who communicate via Breaking Bad GIFs and lack permanent, long-lasting friendships, so you can patently disregard whatever they recommend. Read as many fucking books as you want. You get to explore new places you’ll never be able to see in real life, due to financial and time/space concerns. Martin Luther used the Press, of the Printing variety, to create the Lutheran religion, which came about after he felt rich people buying their way into Heaven was a bad thing. That impulse of the Protestant, of the person protesting inequality, has since branched off in ways he could never have expected, some good, many bad. So it is a mixed thing, but generally, I consider knowledge a positive. A cynical observer would state that so much knowledge, an overload, can result in analysis paralysis, where there are so many options, and choosing the right one is too difficult. Others, too, could point to dystopias of the Brave New World variety, where nothing is censored; the information overload just results in the truth getting buried rather than censored. I can see this happening in the modern day, but I remain forever an optimist, and, of course, your sloth.
Submissions to Plague Circus Press are closed forever, and maybe this is their way of avoiding information overload. They may want to point attention towards a handful of things, those carefully curated, instead of excess where a literary magazine has no definitive end; it can continue as a zombie, never ending. Endings are always the hardest thing to get right.
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