Column083 — September/October 2007
A Visit to Pottersville
Small Press Review,
Volume 39, Numbers 9-10, September-October 2007
Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3:
Adventures in the Underground.
Edited by Jack Saunders. 212p; 2007; Pa;
Pottersville Press, Box 35038,
Panama City FL 32424. $18 ppd.
http://Pottersville Press.
In the November/December 1994 issue of Small Magazine Review, I wrote that 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 dinghy bobbing along with them no matter how many time zones left of the closest shipping lane they find themselves in.”
I seem not to have mentioned Jack in SMR since then, probably because he is mainly a novelist, not a poet (and not what I’d call burstnorm). I’ve tried to keep up with his ouevre, though, and exchanged a card or letter or two with him every once in a while. Sometime last year he invited me to send him a piece for an anthology of writings about what I call the otherstream he’d been commissioned to edit. I threw together a half-assed bit of megalomania about how I compared with Shakespeare as a writer (not unfavorably) and when the anthology, Postcards from Pottersville, Volume 3: Adventures in the Underground, duly came out, it was embarrassingly in it. Actually, I’m not too mortified by what I wrote, but will be making a few changes in it if I ever have it reprinted.
According the website of the anthology’s publisher, the writers represented in the book include “roots musicians, folk artists, and independent filmmakers who share the do-it- yourself ethic that inspired the civil rights movement, environmentalism, women’s lib, gay pride, the peace movement, clear on back to the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey’s bus, Fuurther, with Colored Power written on the side.” Names? There are twenty-six including Al Ackerman, Ron Androla, both John Bennetts, Mike Dean, Lyn Lifshin and Small Press Review’s Number One Alumuna, Laurel Speer.
Those who have been reading Jack since his sons were small will be pleased to find an interview of one of them, Balder Saunders, now grown and playing guitar for an apparently moderately successful reggae-bluegrass fusion band with three CDs to its credit, Dread Clampitt, Warck & Ruin, and Geaux Juice. Of his dad, who ran a website for the band for a time, he says, “Saunders is a loose can on the deck. We just hope he doesn’t get too far afield.”
Among the many interesting pieces in the collection is one from a Canadian point of view by Leopold McGinnis about the differences and similarities between Canadian and American otherstreamers, the former having the double burden of being misfits as innovators in a philistine society and as Canadians in an American society–when, as usually happens, they give up on their native country as writers and try to make it across the border.
Jeff Potter is especially informative about how a DYI (Do-It-Yourself) type can at least make a living in small press publishing. In 1990 he launched a bike magazine called Out Your Backdoor. Here’s how he describes what happened: “I typed up a few brief articles for my zine, scanned in some photos, printed out a master copy and made more copies downtown, stapled up the 5 doublesided pages and mailed it out.
“I realized that it was like a letter to a friend. I had been writing lots of big letters, so I sent this first issue to my usual pals. I also sent it to everyone else I could think of who might be interested.
“I then discovered the world of zines. And it discovered me.
“The underground anarchist types of zinesters opened a bunch of wacky windows of ideas for me. And there were outdoor adventure zinesters, too–quite a few bike zines, in fact. We all started sharing what we were doing. We swapped mailing lists, too. The zine scene boomed in the early 90’s, and OYB boomed along with it.”
Potter learned of Jack Saunders through Popular Reality, my old friend Rev. Nestle used to publish when he was still a male. Potter was sufficiently intrigued by Jack to visit him in Florida. This book was one outcome of the friendship the two and their families developed when Potter later created the Pottersville Press.
I rather doubt that anyone after National Acclaim and/or big bucks will model a career on that of any of the writers’ and other artists contributing to this book, but it presents material that should be of value to sociologists of the future interested in the near- invisible, as many sociologists are. And who knows, one of these long-shots may yet come in, and make reprints of the book mandatory reading in future university English classes. Best, it should prove entertaining for anyone interested in American Culture, and soothe others struggling against the gate-keepers the way the contributors to this book are with the knowledge that they aren’t alone. Here’s how Jack ends the collection:
| I had me some adventures and wrote about them. That’s what the hero does, in myth. Sometimes, when he comes back, Joseph Campbell says, the old men, the tribal elders don’t want to hear what he has to say, because it throws their hustle into doubt, causes confusion and unrest, disquiet. Nothing must change. They try to make him shut his pie hole. What can he do? Again, Joseph Campbell says, quoting Nietzxche, “Behave Disintermediate now. Don’t wait for permission. Start from where you are. Get better by doing it. By and The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Red could stay, because Red was not a bugler. But Prewitt had a call. |
Who are Prewitt and Red? I read the book from cover to cover but can’t answer. It doesn’t matter: they are the generic company man and the Saunders alter-ego. Jack’s still strummin’ the strum in his dinghy–with me and the rest of the Prewitts trying to not get too far astern of him, or running along the shore, cheering him on.