[2001]

1
While writing an article about the stigma attached to self-publishing and the relative value of the same, I happened to look at the best-seller list in the newspaper and saw that two of the top ten non-fiction books were written by professional wrestlers. And the essay seemed irrelevant.

2
"It is really reductive to call what we have now a 'publishing industry,' when what it is a media complex, in which promotability, not literary merit, is the sine qua non." --Novelist and scriptwriter Larry McMurtry.

3
In the self-published ZYX #11 Arnold Skemer brings up THE STIGMA attached to self-publishing activity, the unspoken (sometimes) thoughts one feels coming in--If what you're putting out is any good at all, why the hell isn't it being properly published somewhere? Why indeed. I think it's true everything that is formally published isn't good, in the same way that everything self-published isn't crap. Some qualifying is necessary to understand this underground publishing as something other than "stuff that isn't good enough to get published for real," to look past the stigma to see what is in the material and what justifies the stigma.

Skemer talks about the problems that can arise in dealing with a real publisher, the process of submission, changes demanded, revisions and attempts to please an editor that can take years and end up going nowhere. This process can be a stunting one, since a writer is constantly under the "imperative to go on to new work," he says, and "must go beyond what he has done." Here is one reason self-publishing can be necessary, to prevent one from being held back by the lack of a legitimate publishing outlet. What is the value of all this self-published material lying around, and how should we approach it, understanding that as we do we look at it with a bias for its lack of being legitimately published? And, as Skemer says, "Is Joan Collins worthy of respect because she is 'correctly published'?"

Of course demand can supersede any kind of merit in determining what gets published. What can be easily vended in the marketplace will be produced/published whether it is a contribution to religious historiography or an overly sexually-detailed memoir from some "celebrity" looking for another way to cash in. And the objects in this market can offer a sociological reflection simply by their existence and their numbers. For example, taking a look at the method of classification in chain book stores, Paul Fussell suggests, can tell us a lot about the current literary and educational situation:

The sign "Literature" designates...fairly good novels (only). "Fiction" means bad novels, "Romance" bad novels for female readers. "Biography" means ghost-written memoirs of the shabbyfamous. "Travel" means guidebooks, never travel books. "Occult" means books for adolescents. "Nonfiction" is divided into "Health" (sex and pornography) and "Self-improvement" (jogging and dieting). The section formerly labeled "Essays" or "Belles Lettres" or "Criticism" has simply disappeared.

Walking through a book store is itself an education in Publishing and a gauge of the culture and is recommended for any self-publisher suffering from feelings of inferiority. Going through even a "good" store like Borders is entertaining. There's "Romance"--o.k., we can forgive that because the romance novels are everywhere. We can probably also forgive the rows of sports books, each with their own sections "Golf," "Baseball," etc., because the sections get way dumber. There's "Gambling," "Astrology," [1] and "Tarot." Not far away is "Speculation," where we find books on subjects including aliens, lost continents and Atlantis, and titles like The Anti-Gravity Handbook. Close to that is "Metaphysical Studies," with topics like the aura and past lives. Titles found here include Secrets of Crystal Healing, Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them, and Children's Past Lives: How past life memories affect your child. Around the corner was a section that stopped me, holding me fascinated for about fifteen minutes--"Inspiration." Here were one or two of the Chicken Soup... books (others of which were under "General Psychology") as well as Going for the Max!: 12 Principles for living life to the fullest, We Brake for Joy!, Pray and Grow Rich, and What Happens When Women Pray (which begs for the answer-- Probably the same thing that happens when men do: nothing). Also here were God loves you just the way you are, but he refuses to leave you that way: He wants you to be...Just Like Jesus, Ask Your Angels: A practical guide to working with the messengers of heaven to empower and enrich your life, and I Gave Dating a Chance: A biblical perspective to balance the extremes. The back of this one explained, "Is not dating really the only acceptable option in God's eyes? The answer, assures author and youth pastor Jeramy Clark, is a resounding 'No!'" And how have any of us having sex for a while now gotten by at all without the help of some of the many tantalizing titles found under "Sexuality," which include The New Male Sexuality: The truth about men, sex, and pleasure, and A Celebration of Sex: Enjoying God's gift of married sexual pleasure? And let us all pray that we never have to gaze at the horrific pages of such manuals as Sex Over 40, and Sex Over 50. Add to this several walls of "Business" books and you begin to understand that the guiding rule is Give The People What They Want, and that what many of them want is crap.

4
Looking at ethical wrongdoing in the real publishing world could help boost self-publishers' self esteem. Legitimate journalism contains plenty examples of the ethically screwed-up. There's Washington Post writer Janet Cooke who had her Pulitzer Prize taken away in 1981 when they found out she made up a story about a kid addicted to drugs. New Republic editor Stephen Glass got shit-canned when they found out he concocted people and quotes in twenty seven articles. Cheating the hangman, Patricia Smith resigned from the Boston Globe when someone found out she too had made up quotes and characters. All these are ethically bad. Other cases are more vague, maybe found under "ethical-light."

Feminist Susan Faludi, a contributing editor for Newsweek, was featured on a cover story for that magazine. Now, was she on the cover because she's a writer worthy of that attention, or because she's a writer who works for Newsweek? Skanky over-paid talking head Barbara Walters put one hundred thousand dollars in to an Andrew Lloyd Webber production, but apparently this skipped her mind later when she was doing a glowing, ass-kissing profile on the composer. Her response when this was brought to her attention? "I should have disclosed the investment." Do you think so, dumbass? One hundred thousand here, one hundred thousand there--I'm sure it's easy to forget. I think it's safe to say most of us will never have the experience of being able to invest a large amount of money in something and then go on national TV to advertise it for a half hour, and get paid mightily for doing that.

Politics are sometimes behind breeches of journalistic ethics. CNN reported that the Army used sarin gas on U.S. defectors in Vietnam, believable because the military is often automatically considered evil--as some have suggested to explain CNN's haste. This report was found to be wrong and CNN had to apologize to viewers and enlisted people.

Politics, specifically identity politics or tribalism, has also determined who wins literary awards--awards supposedly given out for artistic merit. People associated with the National Book Awards have claimed that the awards are given out according to a specific politically correct, "diversity"-seeking agenda. One former Book Awards official said, "When I asked why we chose judges only from among left-wing academics instead of working writers, there was definitely discussion that the writers could not be counted on to vote a certain way." Hearing that, it's easy to believe people can initially get published as well for the same reasons.

Sometimes journalism, and "non-fiction," is just complete bullshit from beginning to end. Once I lived in an area where there was a new coffee shop. I was skeptical when the store was written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer by one of their "lifestyle" reporters, a chick who usually gushed all over about anything to do with youth culture. I figured it was probably all bullshit. She covered the poetry readings given there, setting a romantic tone, giving the impression that here could be the beginning of a serious poetry scene. [a couple times, against my instincts, I visited the poetry readings held there. It was all teenagers, reading Edgar Allan Poe.]. She told the story of a guy, a young guy there who frequented the place, committed to his poetry. He was blue collar, newly married, he and his wife had a baby daughter. Busing those tables by day, working his craft at the poetry readings at night; it made you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Well, she got the blue collar part right.

I would go to the coffee shop some afternoons to do schoolwork--it was quiet and deserted then. One time I ran into the guy from the piece done on the store and we started shooting the shit. Recognizing him from a picture in the paper, I mentioned the article and he started laughing. He had fed the chick a total line of shit--he wasn't seeing any one girl, didn't have a kid, and he sure as hell wasn't married. He was committed, mostly to beer and pussy. But he'd given her what she was looking for and the journalist ate it up, went away with her "story." [It's a shame because the real story of this kid, a drinker/slacker, would have been better than the "artist" fantasy concocted for the paper. Did he lie to me too? I don't think so. The persona I witnessed was far from what came across in the article. And really, if he bullshitted both of us--who cares? I'm not writing for a newspaper.]

Sometimes reporters when going through the police blotter for incidents to write up, especially for a human interest story, will always seek a crime that does not reinforce some stereotyped behavior or situation. This is understandable, and not necessarily wrong. Selective reporting is an attempt to influence against stereotyping and bias. The ethical problem is that reality is skewed by misrepresenting the statistical occurrence of events. Right, wrong, or kind of right and kind of wrong simultaneously?

Then there are cases where fiction is passed off as "non-fiction" and awards are won anyway. A memoir of the Holocaust, Fragments, which won a National Jewish Book Award was actually a total fabrication--the author was nowhere near the Holocaust as it turned out. The "autobiography" I, Rigoberta Menchu (a Mayan peasant detailing the Guatemalan government's cruelties) received great critical praise and Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even after it was shown that parts of her book were made up--professor David Stoll investigated and discovered this--some academics have made it known they don't care, continuing to assign the book in class.

5
Journalists concocting characters out of thin air, authors passing fiction off as non-fiction, prestigious awards being handed out on a strictly political basis, intellectuals who aren't ashamed to let it be known that lying and unethical behavior doesn't bother them--all this might sound like good news for the underground. Hey--legitimate media is all a bunch of shit; it's zines that testify to the truth man! But I don't think this is so. What this means is that given the amount of "dirtiness" in areas where there are strict controls to catch ethical transgressions, we can expect a flood of these goings-on in self-publishing where there are no restraints and no punishments for unethical types of behavior.

What can be said about zine or self-publishers ethics? Not much. With no restraints, and no editorial room to have to pass through, there's sure to be much misrepresentation, and passing off of fiction as fact, to a far higher degree than in other publishing. Of course though when reading a zine it is understood that there's no rigorous editorial process, that the creator doesn't have to answer to any one about the content, and so the reader hopefully adjusts the proper skepticism. The zine stock-in-trade though are personal stories, rather than other reporting, which ring true, often more than stories in other publications. Maybe this is because of the rawness or the quirkiness--the styles and usage not altered by another person. Or maybe because the tales themselves are so different from the types we're used to reading.

6
A common problem with zines is an adherence to a way of thinking reflecting the idiotic "The personal is political" belief. Yes, the world revolves around me and my wishes and any slightest inclination I may have in any context no matter how little and innocuous is latent with political force that should be extrapolated to cover as much ground as possible so all others can be forced into my world. Yes, of course. Part of zines' power is that they can personalize events yes, but when working the other way, trying to make sense of something distant, abstract or outside of your own experience in its own right, this theory causes failure, works against attempts at objectivity. Stephen Duncombe (Notes From the Underground: Zines & the Politics of Alternative Culture) [2] mentions the downside of The Personal..., saying it can "widen the gap" between the person and the outer political world. The result is this drift toward thinking there is no truth about a subject aside from your thoughts on it, that statements from elsewhere are only others' "opinions." It fosters misunderstanding more than it does anything else. A political argument founded on history, facts and analysis could have personal experience thrown in but this would be the weakest part of the argument due to its subjective nature. It would be strong in its emotional impact, but exploiting emotions should be left to tv talk show hosts. Collapsing in on your own world like a child is the easy way out; it's an alternative to thinking. And we should probably not be surprised that it's popular at this time in history, given that marking off your own zone of purity and erecting a stockade around it has been on the upswing.

7
Duncombe said zines are a "'culture' of discontent: a virtual bohemia." True, for that number of zines that concern subjects relative to discontent, a number that are probably the minority of zines. Not true for the many zines devoted to things equally as covered in other media: reviews of rock bands, celebrity worship, discussion of TV shows and actors, astrology and the occult. Much of underground publishing and music is just a pale duplicate of the standard culture.

Alternative culture complains that it is co-opted, gobbled up, quickly by those who want to turn it into a commodity. Why does this happen so easily? Because so much of this culture is pointless. Tattoos, piercing, the color of your hair, and the pants you're wearing are related mainly to fashion, and are irrelevant to any kind of "resistance." The same goes for much of what is written about in zines. The producers of zines voluntarily write themselves into irrelevance. Given one hundred percent artistic freedom, and what happens? Many just cover the products of pop culture, celebrities, TV shows, gossip. Many will cover bands--popular bands that have been written about and interviewed in tons of popular magazines already. They are doing free advertising for the products they rave about, and they are harmless.

Some simply vent their anger in the fringe where you can find the most hateful, misogynistic, uninformed and unenlightened stuff you have ever read. Others make themselves irrelevant by concentrating on stupid ideas such as Anarchy or Communism. Harmless and meaningless subjects found in zines include UFOs, conspiracy theories, magic and witchcraft, astrology. These topics and ideas are alternatives to engagement the same way soap operas are. They let the reader escape into a fantasy, a daydream for a time, and they are always there at the ready when the reader/viewer needs a little break from the dreariness and stresses of reality. A problem with the zines that are about imaginary things is that they are creating a smoke screen for the reader who thinks he is really involving himself with something that's subversive or "dangerous." They provide that "subversive" feeling, an effect sought out, without stimulating the reader toward any real thinking.

 

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