September 2015

Colin W. Sargent, Editor & Publisher

When a Portland Magazine story is printed, its life is just beginning. It lives forever in the present tense and awakens with the touch of a new reader.

Digitally, viewers comment on stories they encounter on our replica editions on www.portlandmonthly.com and portlandmagazine.com, as well as stories we post on Twitter and Facebook. In an evolving process across time, a story is transfigured and, in the best cases, deepened, by its reactions and interpretations.

I think of it as an exquisite corpse.

The term Exquisite Corpse, or cadavre exquis, refers to a literary parlor game invented “around 1924 at the old house at 54 rue de Chateau,” according to André Breton in Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, a 1948 catalog for a show of his work at La Dragonne, Galerie Nina Dausset, in Paris. Here, while sampling “tonic local brews,” he and his circle of early Surrealists (among them Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Man Ray’s darkroom magician, Maine’s Berenice Abbott) would begin with a word, then by turns add a new, surprising word to create an astonishing sentence no one could have imagined alone. Real examples of these first “monsters in broad daylight” exist, which Breton recalls as having given “the greatest impression of bewilderment and never-seen”:

Example No. 1: The completely black light  lays down day and night the powerless suspension to do any good.

Example No. 2: The anaemic young girl got the waxed mannequins turned red.

Example No. 3: The made-up shrimp hardly enlightens some double kisses.

In this spirit, I’d like to invite our readers to add dimension to the extending conversation of ideas we begin in our print stories at Portland Magazine. Across the next four issues, on Facebook, we’ll post a story from the current issue and reward the five best insights (that take us to real places with real times and adventures that offer specific new material to a story in the chain of replies) with free one-year subscriptions, which may be gifted if you already subscribe. Then, at the end of 2015, we’ll have a drawing among the subscription winners for the grand prize, a framed Jon Legere image of Old Orchard Beach. Why Legere? There’s a guy who added to the conversation. Portland Magazine stories: We light the fuse, you provide the bang.