Jack Saunders is the ultimate zinester, folks.
He’s been zining heart and soul about the truth of our culture,
and his life, for 30 years now and he’s paid the
FULL PRICE. How many others really honestly have suffered for
their zining? Put it out there knowing what would happen.
Voluntarily forsook high places for the price of truth.
He’s sent jillions of newsletters, broadsides, columns, books, letters
hither and yon, to friend and foe, to his 300-strong Buzzard
Cult. Not willy-nilly. With a plan. To create world literature
via zining, via whatever it takes. Zining does what it has to.
Feel free to discuss and vote. Are Jim Goad and Mike Diana
in this league? Did they KNOW what would definitely happen
and publish anyway? Lose the big IBM job, the house. Yet
NOT lose their innocence? Did they do what they did while
having a wife and kids and NOT betray them? Keep on
keeping up their end of duty? (Heck, how many SUCCESSFUL
mainstream artists have achieved that?)
I’ve read a lot and never seen it done so well. Doug Holland’s
‘Pathetic Life’ was darn good. Are these the contenders?
It’s about the two horns of the dilemma. How
to resolve it without grabbing just one. How to do your best in
the world and in your heart without turning bitter or
turning into a hack or whore. Keeping all the marbles in
plain view, going right to the top every time.
We’re talkin’ Thoreau, Whitman, Paine, Melville, Faulkner, Miller,
Hemingway, Keroauc here…the majors! Zining is BIG STUFF.
Of course I don’t mean the kid stuff.
This is playing for keeps, for high stakes. This ain’t “doin’ a zine
on the side, on the sly”. 30 years of *STARK-NAKEDISM* (Whitman).
Jack came right out and asked his boss, IBM, to publish
his zine officially (internally, externally or both) as UNDERWARE to
help SAVE IBM AND THE PC back in 1985….said that computers weren’t
for geeks, that they should sell reading and writing instead of black boxes.
Like Eastman did for Kodak—sell photography instead of cameras.
Jack said he’d get UNDER the machine to the real impact. Said they needed
to hit the Street, the Open Street, instead of selling their soul to Madison
Ave. —He really did! Jerry Maguire only in the movies? No!—In zining!
Only once, twice? No, he’s published a hundred things and every one of
them has gotten him into REAL trouble. Sunk him deeper…into the zine
as masterpeice territory. Are other zines doing this? Could be! Let’s
hear about em.
Read it and weep. You know none of those real American writers above
could’ve won a prize or been published today or even hired for their own
‘chairs’ or ‘professorships’. In fact publishing killed many of them. Bang!
Which is why perhaps the HOPE of our culture today is in zining.
Again, not the kiddy stuff.
Why are ‘they’ content to let LITERATURE die, be dead, moribund?
Why the decline in real readers? Why can’t a novelist hardly earn a
living noveling? Why no daring? Why no real attempt to compete
with TV? Why only Norman Mailer? Or Ray Carver?
Maybe coz the gears of literature today are all mucked up in brown-nosing
and academia? More is at stake than our heritage…the jobs of weasels who’ll
do anything to keep them. The ‘10,000 sneering writing instructors’ as
Keroauc said. You doubt it? Saroyan said something like ‘literature happens
when writing comes up against the legal structure’. To grow the field
of REAL READING would involve destruction of the current system.
Names, friends, grants, prizes, positions. But they’re runnin’ scared.
One guy can take em down. Solzenytsyn (ouch!) did.
Zining’s roots are big, old and ALIVE typing away down in Georgia.
(Bigfoot must die! ‘Whitey sure likes to kill Bigfoot.’)
Of course zining is connected to the rest of our culture. It’s not a
ghetto.
To be American is to go against the grain.
Read Jack to read up on your zining heritage, stiffen that backbone.
You think I’m making this up? You think the Great American
Novel is dead? It’s all fun and games, killing time, ‘having fun’?
Learn your roots. It reads like you’re thinking out loud,
reads like a letter FROM an imaginary friend.
Read Jack, it’s free at my website.
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Jack, zinester patron saint
If you think ‘god’ is too strong…
Another instalment in my quest to describe the
coolness of Jack Saunders, for those looking for
some sign of life out there…
*His style uses cultural artifacts a bit like those 80’s brat-packers
did (Easton Ellis Bret, et al) only it works LOTS better. He uses
these artifacts in the service of life. He brings them to life.
Basically, he uses quotes from songs, movies and other books.
Jokes he’s heard. Plus what he sees. Towards his goal of
helping all have better lives simply due to his attempt to
give us one honest report.
*His style brings history to life. He uses quotes, bio info
and event details from the past, going all the way back to the
ancients in a fairly even thread, in a way that brings them to
life. So that anyone who thinks that the classics are boring
just doesn’t know what they’re missing.
*He’s a champion of Emerson’s idea that it isn’t meter but a
meter-making argument that makes poetry. He uses only
plain talk about things that matter. Of course, since we’ve
been bludgeoned so badly in the last 50 years or more by
cant, jargon and doublespeak it’s hard to know straight talk
when we see it. Straight talk includes the whole language,
all the good words. Jack boosts your vocabulary in all the
good ways.
*He includes the other forms and previous forms within his
work. You won’t miss out. There’s plot, action, narrative,
interview, poetry, novels, x-rated, romance, essay, screenplay,
anthropology, the works. And plenty more of the NEXT GREAT THING.
After you get a taste of which, reading anything leaves you wondering
why the author is still BACK THERE. Buk pushed it. Jack pushes it
a WHOLE lot further and yet keeps it even closer to home. He’s a
family man, after all, a decent neighborhood guy, God’s own democrat.
Heck, he’s even invented 7 new genres. Hey, learn about them and use
them yourself! Enema verite, crank-lettres, paranoia-critical method,
stark-nakedism, bebop musical, daily typewriting, wewa gothic.
But remember, new is different than what we’re told is new. It takes
some getting used to, freedom, quality and genius does.
Literature has been moved WAY forward while the Univ/NYC/Hwood/TV
apparachik system idles, coasts. Something bigger out there is
DIESELING.
*He fights the Man and the System the best, the only way, possible.
If you think about it. Long enough. Live it. Every day.
All the rest is sending the troops into the grapeshot, as he says.
Read the reports, see why. Literature is the queen of the muses,
when she’s kept down, when no heroes have been let out in decades,
you know somebody’s up to no good. They. Them. Dem.
* He endures. He’s been zining on the job for about 30 years now.
He’s meticulous. His material is camera ready. He sends it out
to all the big houses. They decline. He publishes it himself in
small mail art runs, which drop off the face of the earth, as he says.
He refuses to do what it takes to integrate himself into the art system
(and other systems) since the cost of that is his soul. So he stays
underground, where (some great artist) says the artist belongs.
Which he contends is really the mainstream. Let them come to him.
He’s not the only one out there knowing that it’s not him who’s crazy,
but experiencing the torsion just the same. He’s sending SOS signals asking
if it’s that way in your tribe, too. But he says the signals are getting
weaker. 30 years of rejection, even for the cause of humanity,
can wear you down. Turn you into something strange and new.
There’s gothic for ya.
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