Some would say my turn at Andy Warhol's "15 Minutes of Fame" has long been over, and perhaps they are right. But I think Warhol would have amended his 1968 allotment in this, the so-called Internet Age, where time is warped in freaky and unpredictable ways: some people never grow old, while new wrinkles on other faces are daily scrutinized; news stories can last 10 seconds or 10 years; and a woman, when publicly declared a whore or a criminal, is branded such for a very long time, regardless of the truth of the charge.
And so, here we are: Finkelstein once again "drawing attention" to herself, with apologies to Warhol for re-calculating his prophecy. All pretensions aside, though, I do believe I have something more to say. I want to contribute freely to the ongoing conversation in the electronic town square; I want to shout in the voice I was forced to check during my persecution -- uh, prosecution; I want to declare my love for sex and baseball and the patchwork remains of everything else in the way that artists have always needed to. And, in an attempt once again to convince myself that English is a perfectly good subject to major in, I close this prologue with a quote from Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass":
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
Now, onto the good stuff!
(For those who need refreshing, back story can be found on my Web page.)
