The marketplace, writes Octavio Paz, is not ideological; it has no ideas, it knows all about prices but nothing about values. The hallowed law of supply and demand neglects the mechanisms that operate outside its equation—
that the desire latent in each being clutches wildly at the specter of what resembles satisfaction and yet, to quote the Stones, it can’t get none. The promise conferred by latest product—faster, smaller, sleeker—to improve your lifestyle, alleviate your malaise and fill the void where joy would reside, cannot be kept, which is why the function of art, having to do with pleasures that cannot be quantified, bought, sold or traded, becomes crucial.

This issue of Drunken Boat is a rebuttal of the marketplace—here we have thirty-odd creators who have contributed work under no motivation of pecuniary reward and we are publishing them so that throughout the world, anyone with a computer (which in itself is a kind of dividing line) can abide in their work for no more cost than the passage of time. In this issue, we have a segment of Lisa DiLillo’s film about human rights abuses in Burma, a phenomenon that is not widely publicized, perhaps because America has no vested economic interest there. We’ve included Susan Jennings' luminous representations, evocative of the frangible connection between axon and dendrite. We have also included a piece by the late Charles Dickens, taken from http://www.gutenberg.net, a site whose goal is the entry and storage of various texts for the purposes of free public dissemination.

The premise behind the creation of this journal was cross-pollination, interchange, the way a poem would be illuminated by being coupled with an electronic instrumental, or a story with digital animation. The result speaks for itself and you can—and are in fact encouraged to—speak back to the contributors by sending a missive to: editors@drunkenboat.com.