Love in an Elevator: nebu[lab] 2010 As the Executive Editor of this vibrant creative satellite of Aussie cultural studies hub Nebula, I am pleased beyond all pleasure to bring you one killer inaugural issue.Despite the fact that I enjoy coloring way out of the lines, I did impose a very basic order on the poetry, prose and visual pieces I elected to run; hence as you will see, there is a rather flimsy line separating “Word” from “Image,” with wild card submissions defying categorization and categorizing defiance. All along, my guiding question has been: with whom would I like to be trapped in an elevator, if I had the choice?The answer is clear: the present collection of Pier Queens, letterpress renegades, crafters of soft teratomas, ornithologists, spooky sestinists, creators of little lyric symphonies, robots smashing the lyric with an electric lute, epicenters of taboo, anthropologists of inexplicable communities, photographers of the fleeting, travelers along a route of bombed out amusement parks become fields of iniquity, and so many other strange and rarefied beauties. I am honored to be among them, and to be fortunate enough to have been able to invite them all to send me work and to be in a position to do something fun with it. If you like what you see, then pass on over to the Superstar Ontologies page, where you can check out what our contributors look like, and read their bios.And while you’re here, please make sure to pop on over to the Virtual Panda Project, where you can leave a note for our beloved Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose support over the years has made it possible, even desirable, to undertake a certain form of inquiry and imagination. Thank you for your time and presence!Encourage your friends, associates and frenemies to glance at our publication desiderata and guidelines on the Submit! page and forward nebu[lab] their best. Love, Dr. Michael Angelo Tata, Ph.D. Executive Editor
Publisher's Word: An Elevator to the Sublime
Michael Angelo's genius first came to my attention in 2004 when Nebula: JMS published what would become one of his many rich contributions to the journal. Shortly thereafter, I invited Michael to join our editorial team and since then he has been a generous reviewer of numerous contributions to the journal. A superstar himself, Michael Angelo has a colossal gravitational pull as can be evidenced in his orbital collection of fellow superstar contributors to the inaugural issue of nebu[lab], among whose achievements I find myself as a little, and yet budding, satellite. Our friendship grew over the years, sustained by a series of light-hearted, queer-oriented electronic banter across cyberspace. We missed an opportunity to meet in peron when I visited LA briefly in 2009 and had missed another when I was in Manhattan in 2004. A keen observer of the inexplicable phenomenon of synchronicity, I came to learn much later that the woman who wrote The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve K. Sedgwick, who inspired me and my doctoral supervisor to pursue a doctoral thesis on Female Homosexuality in the Middle East (Routledge, 2007), was also Michael Angelo's mentor. Sedgwick binds us in an additional and unexpected way as we pay homage to her for the inspiration and intellectual inducements that her work continues to provide. It is my greatest wish that nebu[lab] will provide a home to both stellar artists and contributors and those who have yet to receive the recognition they deserve.
With humility and thanks, Dr. Samar Habib, Ph.D. Publisher