Maxim, Puritans, Cartoons, Photos, Poetry, and Other Things

A SPECIES of p.c. Leftist exists, spawned by universities, who are uptight-- almost neo-puritan-- about anything hinting at male ego and the willingness to treat men as men, women as women. One encounters this, surprisingly, even in the anything-goes print underground.

An Example is a new reviewer for Zine World: A Reader's Guide to the Underground Press. He rants in a couple instances against macho "sexist" zeens (such as the fairly inocuous music zeen Fran Magazine out of Los Angeles). "Fuck you," the hysterical reviewer says to the mag again and again.

His review of the ULA's house zeen Slush Pile is more lukewarm, but follows the same thinking as he mentions "the dumb-ass cover (busty-woman with 'ULA' tattooed on her breast drawing). . . ." His opinion of the zeen itself is conflicted: "-- this isn't half bad. It's just, well, drop the 'we're saving literature' bullshit and just write your stories."

FAILURE TO GRASP THE CONCEPT DEPT:
One million other writers in America "just write." The ULA was created to be different. It was meant to be a p.r. campaign for underground writers against the massive totalitarian noise of the conglomerate mainstream.

Many times the ULA's use of ballyhoo has upset timid undergrounders, despite their supposed punk backgrounds. When I've engaged in the simplest kind of promotion done a thousand times better in fields like sports or movies I've been called a "psychotic megalomaniac"-- as if hype has no place in literature, not even in the raucous underground kind. (The charges have been made even by those who could've benefitted by association with the ULA campaign.) Some undergrounders wrap themselves in their obscurity, in their infintesimal niche. They're really just afraid of making waves.

"Miss ULA" is nothing more than a small part of the ULA's hype. In truth, she's dressed more modestly than young women you'll see on the street in any big city on a summer's day. Her frightening cartoon bustiness is tame compared to, say, the photo of Jennifer Love Hewitt on the cover of the current issue of the wide circulation Maxim magazine. (I saw nothing in Fran Magazine to compare with that!)

The difference between Maxim and Slush Pile is this:
The interview with Ms. Hewitt in Maxim is a cartoon, revealing little trace of intelligence in the lady. Jennifer's use of words like "boobalicious" leads me to suspect that Maxim editors wrote her lines.

By contrast, if the Yul Tolbert cartoon drawing of Miss ULA could be interviewed, you'd find her to be articulate and exceedingly bright. She'd have to be! After all, she's part of the ULA star fleet blazing new paths for literature in the 21st century.

I've heard that Jennifer Love Hewitt is actually not as simple as she's portrayed; that her personality is as tied down as her, er, cleavage; that she even-- believe it or not-- writes poetry.

If that's true, then perhaps someday we can make an agreement with Ms. Love Hewitt: That we put her poetry on our site in exchange for her agreeing to play Miss ULA in the movie version of our literary enterprise.

(In the meantime, complaints are streaming in from the Ladies Tea Party section of the Neo-Puritan Literary Society about the photo of Wild Bill up on the ULA's www.literaryrevolution.com fan site.)