Title: The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus!
Author: Wred Fright
[$5, postpaid in the US, 221pp, paper, 6×8. OUT OF STOCK]
Here’s a $5 ZINEBOOK! Zines are cheap…so are ZINEBOOKS! Check it out! Pulp is back! The new pulp is here! …Yet another title in the ULA PRESS zinebook series!
Author Wred Fright first published the PFE as seven issues of a very popular zine that was much sought-after in the early years of zine frenzy.
The PFE is a very funny novel about a garage rock band in a college town. It’s told from the point of view of the band members who are all housemates. So it’s a house novel, too. But unlike most rock and roll novels—which tell the story of a band rising to stardom—Emus is the story of a local band that never makes it big but rocks on anyway.
SCRIBD PREVIEW! Use the following link to check out the covers and the whole first chapter for free at the hipster literary networking site, SCRIBD. It’s a place where people show each other their lit-wares: www.scribd.com/doc/14939958/The-Pornographic-Flabbergasted-Emus
IT’S ON ISSUU, TOO! Free literary networking rocks. Check out the first chapter view at Issuu, too: issuu.com/jeffoyb/docs/ula.emus.ebook.sample.
The author is a longtime garage rocker himself. Possibly because of this the book has an interesting layout. It’s set up like a rock song. Each chapter title has an A-side/B-side and a lead-in. The 4 main bandmembers/housemates then each tell a story which is labeled as an intro, verse, or chorus. There’s a coda to wrap things up. A new person in the chapter gets to do a middle eight. But that’s not all: each of the main housemate/voices gets his own typeface which sets his story apart. The bandmates live their own lives but who ever sees similar events in the same way?
As is the rule with ULA PRESS projects, the PFE is more realistic, fresher, bolder—and thus funnier—than somewhat related work by big publishers. It’s also bawdier, rougher, as if a real person wrote it instead of a committee buffed by profs and backed up by lawyers. ULA PRESS offers vital lit again for a change.
Author Wred Fright denies he was raised in the wild by emus, but he has played guitar and sung in such bands as The Escaped Fetal Pigs, Anal Spikemobile, Rage Against Dabney Coleman, and Team Fright. He currently roams the former USA serving as the Ohio Bureau Chief of the Underground Literary Alliance. He studied zines for his PhD—the first person to do so! His website is wredfright.com.
When he does readings he usually plays some quality thrash rock, too. He puts on a show. He has a surprise heckler / maniac sidekick. It’s rock’n’roll.
Media Hits!
www.clevescene.com/Issues/2007-01-31/music/aroundhear.html
Reviewlets
[JULY 16, 2007] FIRST “BIGGER MAG” REVIEW! — OK, Razorcake is still “just” a zeen, but we’re on our way! Here’s the start of the review: “This the smartest “dumb” book I’ve read in ages. Wred Fright has tackled many difficult tasks. 1.) Making me care about college students’ lives, even if they are in a garage band. 2.) The original incarnation of the PFE was serialized in zines…yet it stands the strongest as a complete novel because the longer I was in each of the character’s heads, the more I enjoyed the momentum of the book. Reading PFE was like hopping on a barely moving freight that gains speed. It was really hard to jump away from when it started hauling along. 3.) Wred’s omniscient control of both the plot and the characters is, well, unfuckingbelievable (you will also learn the name of the literary device of adding a swear word in the middle of an existing word in the book). …” A link to the rest of it: www.razorcake.org/site/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=11422
[JUNE 3, 2007] “I was introduced to this novel as a series of independent zines. So when I found this one-place collection of the entire serial, I dove in immediately… Part SPINAL TAP, part TRAILER PARK BOYS part MIGHTY WIND/ WAITING FOR GUFMAN and all the way great, Wred Fright mixes his real life experiences with fake life experiences into a piece of literature that inspired and captivated me to the point that I was sad to see it end. …I was looking for the me in this book. When I couldn’t find my contribution to Wred’s written work DIRECTLY, I took a minute to reflect and realized that I was in this book everywhere, and you, humble Neus Subjex reader, are in this book everywhere, and everyone you know, whether you recognize their names or not! This book is a book of the people ABOUT the people…. ALL THE PEOPLE… “Our” Time, the time WE had. I highly recommend this novel in every way possible.” –Shawn Abnoxious www.theneussubjex.com/issue70.htm#THE%20PORNOGRAPHIC
“It was good. And funny. Not as good as some, but better than most, by far. I’d put it in the neighborhood of The Glass Castle.” –Martha, who reads top fiction and bestsellers in her reading group.
“Fred was the finale of Friday night’s events. He read from his rock’n’roll novel, which I became quite familiar with when we toured together — and it is still, to this day, one of the funniest stories I have ever read. The kind of thing that you should not read on public transportation, because you will laugh out loud, and everyone will turn to stare at you.”—Jessica Wilbur nee Disobedience
“It’s like the Monkees with sex and booze. If I was a TV producer I’d buy the rights to the Emus and shop them around as the Monkees of the New Millennium and we’d have a hit.” —Xerography Debt
“This zine is one of the best I read.” —Blank Generation
“‘m getting impatient for the next one.” —Zine Thug
“I found myself laughing out loud a number of times, and that’s rare.” —Zine World
Excerpt…
By promising the local band These Fags Are Pissed! a spot at next year’s city arts festival, for which he is apparently now the musical director, George wrangled us a Sunday afternoon practice at the T.F.A.P. house.
“House” however probably isn’t an accurate description… I can’t imagine how these guys live here, but they do. There’s holes in the walls, holes in the ceilings, holes in the floor, holes in the roof. The floor in one room upstairs is almost completely gone and they’ve just balanced couches on the remaining support beams so that one has to surf across the couches to cross the room.
There are other worries, like how to get into the basement where These Fags practice since the stairs to the basement have all rotted away. We have to actually climb down a rope to get down there to practice. “Sorry dudes,” one of These Fags tell us, “The ladder broke last week.”
Fortunately, These Fags are letting us use their equipment, and in this damp, dark, dank, disgusting basement, sitting up on rickety, broken down, wooden pallets above puddles of water are the biggest amplifiers, most expensive guitars, and nicest drumset I’ve ever seen…
One Fag says to me, “We figure why spend money on rent when we can spend it on getting bigger amps and better guitars.”
Another Fag says, “Unfortunately, since the stairs rotted away, we haven’t been able to play out because we can’t figure out how to get the equipment out of the basement without damaging it.”
“But practice kicks ass,” yet another Fag says.
