Thursday, February 24, 2005

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.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed Tony's MR (finally available for viewing!), and have two thoughts:

-We've definitely been through a "golden age" of TV in past decade. Whatever you think of The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, Cheers, Frasier, etc. etc., they are/were consistently funny, well-written, sometimes diabolically clever shows. In other words, miles above what passes for genre literary fiction these days. One of the few popular writers who seems to actually care and write about current cultural trends is Douglas Coupland (I mean, come on, Gen X is a brilliant book and he wrote a novel about blogging in 1995, before most people had email, fer crissake. Forget Neal Stephenson) Anyway...

-I echo Tony's call for a more progressive political art, and it amazes me that with all the rich material around us more writers aren't taking it and running (I know I am in a number of short stories I'm working on, but then where will I have these published? The mainstream fiction outlets are absolutely closed off; the closest the NYer will come to subversion is George Saunders--a cute writer, great imagination, but no bite).

We have the 101st Fighting Keyboard Commandoes, those chickenhawk neo-con brownnoses like Reynolds, Sullivan, Jarvis, Lileks, Goldberg, making outrageous claims that they are "fighting terrorism" in their pajamas and suburban dens; deleting, changing, and "Stalinizing" earlier posts and not only not denying it, but trumpeting it as a great, honorable thing to do--we have this psychopathic right wing hysteria machine trampling everything decent and good in this country, rush limbaugh a felony drug addict screaming after rehab that he problem was he's "too nice" and really, really believing it.

We need our Sinclair Lewis, not Michael Lewis; we need Dawn Powell, not Colin Powell. We need the satirists and muckrakers and risk-takers to start taking this shitheads down in print, where it does the most damage, and stand up to the Rethug bullies. The narcissists and blogopaths MUST NOT win.

Anonymous said...

I'm a girl. So I'm very offended by the nature of the cover of you zine. I hate it that Miss ULA looks pissed as shit and accusatory; not timid or vapid, the only two qualities I am able to convey as a woman. The next time you place a member of the female gender on the cover of your zine, please depict her as being absolutely ashamed of her sexuality and horrified by her own nudity.
But that's all the shit they say. The "feminist" lit. being written right now is only about how it's wrong for men to make us feel like we should be skinny. Everything else that's happening is ok with them.
Hey, he drew a picture of a woman. Women have tits. I have a couple myself. I like mine. I like to wear low-cut shirts with push-up bras. I like my tits so much that I take my shirt off in B-horror movies just for fun. So much that I take my clothes off for money. I like my ass, too. I like asses. I like sex.
Who would have cried if you had put a picture of man with a big bulging package in his pants?
Miss ULA is a strong, assertive woman. I think that offended them more than her tits. She's ANGRY at the establishment and she's out for blood in the name of the underground. She likes her tits. She thinks she looks hot. Fuck off, and leave her alone. Let her show her tits if she wants.
I have to go now. I'm horny.
Bernice Mullins

Anonymous said...

P.S. If you want to look at my tits go here
http://www.angelfire.com/indie/dskproductions/bernice.html
or here
http://www.angelfire.com/indie/dskproductions/
But beware you might be offended.

Bernice Mullins

Anonymous said...

NICE TITS!!!

But damn, Bernice, how can you be smiling in that picture? When you know it was the evil patriarchal women-enslavement machine that GAVE you those sweet ta-tas in the first place? Come on, girl, why haven't you gotten a breast reduction and frown implants and a perm??? You are destroying the assumed dignity of unsexy women everywhere!!!

Tim

p.s. I'm horny now too. DAMN YOU!!!

chilly charlie said...

TIM HALL IS STALKING YOU.

ASK HIS FRIEND DEAN HASPIEL WHY.

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