Franklin
Rosemont (ed.), Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices – Long Live the
Living! City Lights Books San Francisco CA, 1980.
Quarto;
paperback, with illustrated wrappers; 120pp., with many monochrome
illustrations. Mild wear; spine and hinges a little rubbed; previous owner’s
name in ink to the first page. Very good.
Back
in the pre-internet days, if you wanted to make a noise about something, you’d
have to find like-minded folk and band together to pool resources and energies
and find a way of making a statement. Things such as film or television content
were usually way beyond anybody’s reach, and radio broadcasts either involved
huge set-up costs and specialised knowledge, or contacts with local broadcasters
– who usually had little sympathy for fringe points of view, like horror
fiction from the 1930s, say. The way most people got around this was by
creating magazines, which stressed little in the way of technical nous and were
far more affordable.
The
‘zine’ has been with us for a long time; in fact, when most people these days
encounter zines for the first time, they assume that they are a relatively new,
quaint, pointedly Luddite, innovation. In fact, they have been with us since at
least the 17th century – where they were known as ‘chapbooks’ – and have
probably existed in one form or another since people first got the idea to
write words on something approximating paper. In all eras, and under whatever
title, the purpose of the zine is to rapidly disseminate ideas and information
about burning issues, at least those that the authors are particularly fervent
about.
In
the 1600s, printers took books and other material from publishers and prepared them
for publication. This meant organising an appropriate amount of paper,
preparing images to be engraved, setting text into movable type frames and
readying the ink. After the text blocks were done, they were sent to a bindery
(which may or may not have been an in-house department) and were bound between boards.
In all of this there were degrees of waste: pages were often trimmed close,
leaving miniscule margins in order to reclaim paper or conserve binding
materials; plates might have been printed separately and reduced in number, or
even left out of the finished book (possibly to be sold as standalone prints).
Whatever the reason, usually there was a certain amount of leftover paper which
could be re-purposed as something else.
These
“something elses” were often ‘catchpenny pamphlets’, small, folded booklets that
announced local political or other newsworthy events (such as eyewitness
accounts of coronations or comets, or the exploits of highwaymen) or which
contained recipes or medicinal cures – even magical treatments approximating
the contents of grimoires – whatever the printers thought would ‘catch the pennies’
of people walking by. Horoscopes and Almanacs all had their start with these
humble roots.
In
the 1920s zines were huge (and the word originated around then), focussing
mainly upon political movements – such as the support for Communism, and outrage
against the proposed Income Tax, in England – and were usually distributed during
strikes and demonstrations. Later still in the 1960s, zines were a way to
connect various fan-based, mystical, political or artistic communities and were
a hallmark of both the hippy movement and the occult circles of the later
Crowleyites and the LaVey Satanists. The Underground Comix scene, with characters
such as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Rat Fink, arose from these
beginnings.
These
publications all have a handmade feel about them, with an aura of low-tech
production. It’s well to remember that such material was typed out, then cut up
and pasted onto graph paper, prior to being put through a pre-press photographic
process and then sent off to be printed. There were little or no computer-based
desktop publishing options available to home brew publishers and fan groups.
Consequently, the appearance of the pages is rough and ready – there are
strange, “widow” text fragments, poorly-reproduced photographic images, odd mismatches
in text styles, flat photocopied pictures. There is an amateurish quality to
the production but also a lot of energy. And it’s representative of this item.
The
subject of this book is the idea that surrealist forces are universal and can
be found within much popular content; that popular entertainment somehow ‘enables’
Surrealist dissemination. Every form of popular investigation of artistic creativity,
from Shaker art to the Flying Saucer phenomenon, they argue, is redolent of
Surrealist forces, whether extant in their intrinsic material or imposed
through various means of transmission (like being shown on free-to-air TV, with
intercut ad-breaks, for instance). The tension between generating art with surrealist
intent and of the art generating further surrealistic impulses – either deliberately
or accidentally – is fully discussed with many disparate examples. And one of
those is Lovecraft.
The
Lovecraftian material is relatively small. There are two “articles” (if such
short pieces can be so termed) reprinted from a similar French publication
(above), and a longer piece which examines HPL’s views on Surrealist Art as
touched upon in his last unposted piece of correspondence (below). The article
claims that this letter is here reproduced in full, while the text itself is presented
as a series of “excerpts”, so the true state of affairs is open to debate by
those creatures with greater access to the material than I. Essentially the
wording here is a bit loose, but that’s kind of expected as a feature of this
style of publication. There is a bit of background discussion taken from the
private papers of Frank Belknap Long trying to pin down whether HPL was even
aware of the Surrealist Art movement and whether he allowed it to influence his
stylings. It boils down to a resounding “Maybe?”, as most of these discussions
inevitably resolve, but it’s an amusing examination for those inclined to
explore such stuff.
After 1980, when this book was produced by City Lights Books in San Francisco, the ability of single individuals to generate this kind of niche exploratory material for a wide audience grew exponentially. Nowadays, such material is the province of blogsites or Reddit threads and the notion of being produced in a hardcopy format like this is almost an alien concept. Still, it’s good to get hold of something like this and feel a connexion to an older style of fan discussion and to see that – in all the ways our talk has changed over the years – it’s still the same game.
