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Next Issue: Beavis & Butt-head Extravaganza
Recent
Issues:
College
Fiction
Journal
First, some backstory: For those who have
never seen it, College Music Journal is a monthly magazine, CD sampler
included, that does a pretty good job of covering the sorts of music
heard on college radio stations. Granted, the CD is filled with songs
that the labels want to push, but sometimes the labels push good
songs, and the magazine itself is well-informed and pulls no punches
in its reviews (although the feature puff pieces do grow
tiresome). Plus, the range of music covered is impressive -- there is
the obligatory concentration on alternative and punk derivatives, but
also reasonable coverage of rap, techno, metal (yes, metal is still
there, plotting the day that its dark rituals will once again rule the
world!), country, folk and world music. It's cheap (subscriptions are
~$4.00 an issue), and it exposes it's readers to much music they would
otherwise never have seen.
College Fiction Journal is an attempt to do
the same for obscure fiction; to borrow techniques from music
marketing to get young writers exposure, a cachet of hipness, and
maybe some sales. I can just see the struggling writers, plugging away
alone night after night, muttering to themselves: "What a great idea!
Why should the musicians get all the anonymous blowjobs?"
CFJ tries, really tries, to make writers
seem hip -- often by explicit or implied comparisons with
musicians. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Ok, we already
knew that Pagan Kennedy was cool. Katie Katlovitch, who spent time as
a heroin-addled fluffer before learning to write crypto-nostalgic
paens to the slow adolescent disintegration of security, is labelled
the 'Courtney Love of the new fiction', apparently with some
justification. And there is a simple elegance to Maggie Ko's sudden
abandoment of grad school at Harvard for the writing life as a
dishwasher-poet in Alberquerque. But after ten suburb-raised riot
nrrrd sci-fi writing whiteboys, they start to blend into each
other. And, for example, Shepard Frost is a not-very-attractive guy
who lives in a basment in Pittsburgh and churns out creepily erotic
horror stories laden with skeleto-insectile imagery; no matter how you
dress up those facts, no matter how hard you try to make him look like
the Guided by Voices of horror fiction, he's still not going to have
groupies. Well, Marilyn Manson has groupies, but it just doesn't seem
to work out that way for writers.
Like CMJ, CFJ comes in two parts: a glossy
magazine with reviews, features, and interviews, and an arty little
chapbook with poems, excerpts and stories. You can feel them
stretching the music industry metaphor to fit: novels, magazines, and
compilations are like 'albums', and stories, excerpts, and poems are
'singles', used to whet the appetite and push product. I wonder how
much corporate influence is here; unlike music, where the post-Nirvana
Lemming rush into alternative left most independents financially in
bed (whether monogamously or not) with the majors, the fiction
underground of is still mostly a labor of love. A good chunk of the
excerpts here seemed to come from the small press; a good sign. The
sample chapbook was all over the map in quality: I gave up on most of
the stories after three sentences, and I used some of the poems as
comic relief between takes down at the set. But a couple of stories
were good enough to pass along to script readers; and I even bought a
book because of an excerpt.
One thing I really liked about CFJ was it's
apparent disregard for genre boundaries. In one page, reviews of
placid mainstream literary fiction, Sylvia Plath school
if-I-don't-write-I'll-kill-myself poetry , 'This story does not
contain the letters 'q' and 'b'' class of experimental fiction, and
bad Dickian sci-fi all coexist happily. There were news columns
specializing in specific genres, which seemed to do a pretty good job
of covering what I (and my boyfriend) were familiar with. Given how
much some of SurReview's contributors complain about being ghettoized
in genre catagories, I take this a good sign, and one that mirrors the
need of music to pump vital fluid of novelty from the fringes to feed
the ravenous, bloated mass of the mainstream.
All in all, I think CFJ is a great idea,
although I have doubts about its continued survival. I fear for its
ability to appeal to the broad CMJ crowd: college kids who
painstakingly established their hipness by cluing their friends in to
Shonen Knife and King Missile before they were cool. But until it
folds, they've got my subscription.
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