Column009 — November 1994
My Summer Vacation
Small Magazine Review, November 1994, Volume 2, Number 4
Blaster 288 pp.; 1994; Pa; Feh! Press, Meshuggah No. 10, June 1994; 56 pp.; End Time 299 pp.; 1994; Pa; AK Press, Global Mail September–December 1994; Jack Saunders, who will soon have written “100 books without selling a word to New York or Hollywood,” has a simple mode of operation: every day he sits at his computer for 37 hours or more and, like his hero Jack Kerouac, writes whatever comes into his head–which is mostly a defense of writing whatever comes into his head. Much of this is repetitious–but mythically so, and vastly reassuring to his fans (I’m proud to be one) who, my guess is, are similarly “marginal” writers who won’t give up in spite of NY and Hollywood, and are grateful to find Jack’s leaky but still somehow seaworthy dingy bobbing along with them no matter how many time zones left of the closest shipping lane they find themselves in. A strictly plain-text prosist, Saunders is no experimental writer. I’m writing about him here, though, because he was one of the people I was supposed to meet this summer at Rev. Crowbar’s Big Schmooze, an event intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the reverend’s publishing house, Popular Reality–and the publication of Al Ackerman’s first full-length book, Blaster. This latter includes, by chance, a piece on Saunders that Ackerman wrote with the help of Trixie, the remarkable five-legged squirrel that Rev. Crowbar has trained to nibble exact replicas of Alexander Pope’s signature into the foreskins of any vug-Randolph who succeeds in getting through the body of Ethan Allen that John M. Bennett donated to the reverend as protection from said vug-Randolphs, who are large sentient beetles given to mimicking Saunders’s prose style and calling it poetry. Forgive me, but as soon as I mentioned Ackerman, my case of acker-imitatis flared up yet again and I couldn’t help emitting the passage above (and this one). For further details on this malady, see the upcoming issue of Lost & Found Times, which is due out sometime early in 1917, assuming the vug-Randolphs don’t take advantage of the absence of Ethan Allen from editor Bennett’s study. Ackerman is much funnier than my lame imitation might lead one to guess, incidentally. His forte is the hilarious but somehow sympathetic delineation of characters like the guy in “2197 Vienna Sausages” who, after months of being ignored by “a hefty blond” he dotes on, suddenly dreams up a sure-fire way to impress her: he will make an overcoat entirely out of vienna sausages. It is instructive to compare Ackerman to such a (first-rate) knownstream humorist as Dave Barry: where Ackerman comes out ahead is in (1) daring to occasionally break out in passages like “I like people who turn up their nose at Helen when she was sick again. Not that the recovery was followed by a relapse, exactly, where too sick to travel thought winter fell in love with puffy skin”; (2) daring to offend, as in stories like the one about a boy’s visiting a convalescent home to meet FDR, who hadn’t died in office but lost his marbles, and FDR’s trying to embrace the boy while “at the same time asking (him) in a loud whisper if (he) had ever handled a trouser snake”; and (3) daring to reveal depth of culture–with references to figures like Thomas Merton, for example–instead of to the ephemera writers like Barry depend on, like whoever the present chief executive of the U.S. happens to be. In short, Ackerman is simply larger than such family-faring syndicatees as Barry–which means he’ll not likely have a sitcom based on his writings, but that his writings will make more of a splash a century from now than Barry’s are likely to. Saunders, by the way, never made it to the Schmooze: one of his current broadsides (some of which he’s calling “Olla podrida”) details the financial disasters responsible for that (like losing his home, etc., because of all the money he’s put into self-publishing). He was sorely missed, but Ackerman showed up, and Bennett–and some guy named G.A. Matiasz whose SF/Oakland-based early 21st-century thriller called End Time I’m currently in the middle of and finding not only highly professional but intelligent, a rare combination in fiction. It’s fun-reading, too! Simeon Stylites, publisher of, among other things, Blaster and the zine, Meshuggah (whose “special religion issue” includes this quote from Tammy Faye Bakker: “I take Him shopping with me. I say, ‘OK, Jesus, help me find a bargain.’”–but which also includes serious material, such as a little-known essay on Christianity by Robinson Jeffers) was on three occasions sighted lurking in one of the 42 corners of the Crowbar mansion, and Ashley Parker Owens showed up one afternoon and passed out copies of her dizzyingly thorough “listing” (400+ entries from 39 countries) of “all kinds of art projects, collaborations, and mail art events,” Global Mail. Dang, so many more people and publications to mention, but I’ve run out of space. Guess I’ll have to continue this next time. |