Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/FactSheet Five/Black_Ice_Books

Internet Message Format | 1994-07-24 | 7KB

From: [e-mail]
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 01:53:49 UTC
Newsgroups: alt.zines
Subject: REVIEW: The Problem with Black Ice Books







THE PROBLEM WITH BLACK ICE BOOKS:
BEYOND NEPOTISM AND VANITY PUBLISHING



DOGGY BAG by Ronald Sukenick.  1994. 156 pps. Paper. $7.00. ISBN: 0-932511-82-1.

THE ETHIOPIAN EXHIBITION by D.N. Stuefloten. 1994.  112 pps. Paper.  $7.00.
ISBN: 0-932511-85-6

DAMNED RIGHT by Bayard Johnson. 1994. 168 pps. Paper. $7.00.  ISBN:
0-932511-84-8.

HOGG by Samuel Delaney. 1994. 160 pps. Cloth, Limited Edition. $21.95.
ISBN: 0-932511-88-0.

All four from Black Ice Books/Fiction Collective II Campus Box 494
Publications Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0494.


        Last year, Black Ice Books, an imprint of the notorious Fiction
Collective,  edited by a committee of four, released, with great fanfare,
the first four titles in this series, accompanied by a West Coast
collective reading tour that garnished the titles considerable attention.
Never mind that two of those books were from two of the editors of the
series, another by a former student of one of the editors, and the other
from a personal friend of another editor.  Of course, this is what much of
small press publishing has been about, editors publishing themselves and
their friends, when no one else will do it;  never mind looking through a
submission pile to find that wonderful unknown, we gotta publish ourselves
to keep our tenure.
        There's a great problem with this, and Black Ice Books in general,
that this series is trying to deceive the reading public as being something
that it is not.   In their advertisements, they claim to publish "the new
generation of dissident writers in revolt."  What I fail to understand,
with the release of the next four titles from this series here, is how
Ronald Sukenick, who has been publishing well over thirty-five years and
has established himself, along with Raymond Federman and Steve Katz, as one
of the old pros of "experimental" fiction, can be labeled as someone from
"the new generation of dissident writers in revolt."  Sukenick is of the
old garde, a gray-haired tenured professor with a cushy job and certainly
not "new."  Furthermore, Sukenick, as one of the editors of this series
(along with Mark Amerika, Larry McCaffery, and Curtis White) pats himself
on the back a little too much by writing his own cover copy and publishing
himself.
        At first I was going to claim this act of arranging for your own
book's publication as meta-nepotism, but a friend pointed out that you
cannot perform the act of nepotism on yourself.  I then realized that this
was vanity press publishing of the highest sort --- you run a well-known
and moderately successful small press with university and federal grants
supporting it, you use your position to publish your own work, you try to
catch onto the media wave of  "the successful young writer" of the past ten
years (Bret Ellis, Douglas Copeland, Jay McInerney) by calling yourself
part of "the new generation,"  and who's really going to know what you're
up to but a handful of people?
        The major problem is that Sukenick's Doggy Bag is not "new" at all.
 It's the same plotless ramblings of well-crafted sentences lacking any
character or depth and excusing itself as "experimental"  that he's been
doing for the past two decades.   Within some typographical tricks and
middle-aged professorial fantasies of having affairs with students,
Sukenick further tries to ride the present popular wave of  by putting in
people "infected with a computer virus," and a host of sitautions and
characters that have been done over and over by many modern science-fiction
and mainstream writers.  This book is called "hyperfictions" (a number of
loosely-strung narratives disguising themselves as a "novel") yet there
seems to be nothing very hypertextual about the work, not in terms of real
hyertext.   I doubt Mr. Sukenick has ever  been on the Internet or truly
knows that subculture, because he makes many errors and flaws trying to
imitate what writers half his age are already masters of (like Don Webb).
Perhaps the best reason why Sukenick published his own book is for the
simple reason that no one else would.
        D.N. Stufloten's The Ethiopian Expedition, on the other hand, is a
marvelous little book, a novella really --- witty, original, crafty, and
very surreal.  At least Stufloten isn't one of the editors, but the Fiction
Collective did already publish one of his books.   This is the type of book
that makes the smaller presses a proud thing: something that would never
see a home with a large commercial house, yet is worthy of being published
and made available.  I cannot say the same for Bayard Johnson's Damned
Right, though.  Damned Right is Black Ice's politically correct book,
touching on both Native American writers and gays, yet is a shoddy
re-working of On the Road with two-dimensional characters and an unmoving
plot, despite all the driving around.
        The oddity is the fourth book, Samuel Delaney's long-awaited Hogg,
written twenty-five years ago and rejected by every publisher Delaney sent
it to.  It is a very explicit, frightening and painful book narrated by an
underage boy, describing his sexual molestation, rape, and initiation by a
larger-than-life,  evil man named Hogg.   This is an important work of
pornography, a reflection of our decaying age, and an excursion into
extremity; at last, one of the bravest gay novels, or any novel, I have
recently read.  It makes Doggy Bag look like a joke in its incredible scope
of risks and artistry.  However, the oddity is that this is not published
as a paperback like the other Black Ice Books,  but in limited edition
cloth.  Word has it that this was done because Black Ice didn't want, for
the nature of the book's controversy, to call too much attention to it.
Were they fearful of losing grant money or being called politically
incorrect for publishing a novel that is basically "kiddie porn"?
        The real obscenity here is the old refusing to move aside and make
way for the new.  Black Ice Books is trying to pull one over on us by
calling themselves "new," when in fact it is being run by the same old
fellows who've been running things for a long time, publishing themselves
and trying to get a nibble from what younger writers are forging today.
The obscenity is that many good wordsmiths who are really   "the new
generation  of dissident writers in revolt" are having the doors shut on
them so the good old boys can keep publishing themselves and their friends,
looking away from what true alternative press is about: finding the new,
the young, the untried,  and supporting it.




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