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Title: Afterword To The Feh! Press Edition Author: Bob Black Language: en Source: http://spunk.org/texts/writers/black/sp001649.html Notes: A postscript to my “first and worst book,” The Baby and the Bathwater, or, Post-Partum Repression: The Unspeakable Truth About “Processed World, reprinted by Feh! Press several years ago and now again available from Rodney E. Griffith/Inspiracy in Cleveland.
Never a chart-buster, this book, to my amazement, just won’t go away. I
brought out the “first edition,” if I may so dignify 100 Velo-bound
photocopies, in early 1985 as the conflict it recounted continued. By
then I was living — as secretly as I could — in an unheated room in
Berkeley. I soon made a few additions and corrections for what I called
the “1-1/2^(th) edition”; a dissident office worker ran off 30 copies
for me at work. I sold some of these 130 copies but sent most to local
media or to leftist or anti-authoritarian publications nationwide (and
several abroad) which usually ignored them. I’d done all I could, I
felt, to settle the record by the time I moved to Boston with ex-PW
Donna Kossy (and my familiar, The Anarcat) in fall 1985.
Unexpectedly, there was a small but persistent interest in the book.
Rev. David Crowbar of Popular Reality (1984–1987), one of the few
publications to cover the Processed World scandal, for several years
made photocopies of the book available. Those who owned copies often
loaned them out to others — especially to the kind of political
neophytes the PW’s specialize in flimflamming. I would not infrequently
hear from these readers and welcomed their queries. Cynically, I always
urged them to question PW too, well aware that they’d get snubbed and
placed on an enemies list. I’ve heard from second-hand B/B readers from
as far away as England, where no more than two or three copies could
have penetrated.
Between the writing of B/B and the Hegira to Boston, I passed 4-1/2
months in Los Angeles working for the American Civil Liberties Union of
Southern California, at work/study wages, doing legal research and
writing in support of some of their victimless-crime litigation. For the
first time in almost a year I felt safe. I was also in love. Although PW
had pronounced me monomaniacal and obsessive, what I did next, ignoring
those who’d exiled me, was produce some of my best-known and (in my
opinion) best texts, such as “The Abolition of Work,” “The Best Book
Catalog in the World,” and “Elementary Watsonianism.” (Writing well is
the best revenge.) The first two provoked Loompanics Unlimited to
propose to publish the collection which came out a year later as The
Abolition of Work and Other Essays. The second I sold to one left-yuppie
throwaway after another, beginning with the LA Reader; it remains my
all-time moneymaker.
“The Abolition of Work” has assumed the dimensions of a minor classic (I
daresay). Thousands read it in the Semiotext(e) “USA” issue (for which I
opened my files to provide a lot of other bumf too) and other thousands
in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. It’s been translated into French,
German, Dutch, Slovene and Italian (a Spanish translation is in the
works). In trying to suppress or marginalize me, Processed World has, at
best, failed miserably, and at worst, given my project a boost.
Readers of my first book (or my second, Friendly Fire [Autonomedia
1992]) have come across fresh whacks st PW, but not because there is
anything fresh about PW, which Gary Brown well and long ago
characterized as “the magazine with a bad smell.” B/B exudes an anxiety,
not unreasonable when (and under the circumstances in which) it was
written, that the PW drive for local hegemony might prevail. In the
event, PW never got out of the leftist ghetto or greatly increased its
market share. The myth of the hip, happy-go-lucky dissident office
workers still sometimes slithers into print, but it’s clear by now that
the formula is no more than a maintenance dose. Not even the publication
of a greatest-hits coffee-table book, Bad Attitude — which,
characteristically, includes (without explanation or apology) the
productions of defectors — pulled the PW’s out of their stagnant
isolation. They are all that they’ll ever be, and they aren’t much.
If so, of what interest is a book like this? The danger of which it
warns (and, in hindsight, exaggerated) is long past. About a year after
this book appeared, one of its purchasers, Lawrence — a sometime
volunteer at Bound Together Books — came out as the Slasher. Wisely, the
PW’s left him severely alone. By then Bay Area anti-authoritarians were
so polarized that I was not getting any intelligence about the PW’s
because nobody on either side of the conflict was on speaking terms with
anybody on the other. In 1985, Processed World announced it was
preparing a rebuttal to this book. Alert to the lesson of the Tar Baby,
it never issued one.
If this book is of any lasting interest (except to my biographers) it is
as a case study in political pathology. Professing an anti-authoritarian
(if unnamed) ideology, college-educated, longstanding residents of as
cosmopolitan a metropolis as any in the world, the PW control group
nonetheless constructed as introverted and self-referential a cult as
Jim Jones did. If the leadership consciously deceived the followers — as
this book proves beyond a reasonable doubt — at a higher level it was
self-delusive too. Even the victims and critics, myself included, came
to share (even as we despised and denounced) the cult’s sense of
self-importance. Unwittingly we played into their hands, which is why,
locally, the PW’s triumphed. Even I, who took them so seriously, never
took them as seriously as they took themselves.
This book, even as updated in early 1985, does not finish the story of
my on-the-scene conflict with PW. I was, as mentioned, in hiding. When I
finally finished this book I wondered what to do next. I remembered Boni
Thoreson’s would-be yogurt hit from which Donna Kossy saved me and then
made a poster out of. I took the subway across the Bay to return the
favor, to the downtown streetcorner where the PW’s hawked their wares.
Chris Carlsson sported the cardboard TV-set head-piece Greg Dunnington,
long since expelled, had made for them. I flung the contents of a
container of, by then, rather rancid yogurt (but not the container
itself) in the TV-framed face of Chris Carlsson (his last words,
pre-impact: “Uh-Oh”). Unfortunately, after a two-block chase, Carlsson
tackled me punched me out, spit in my face and, in the course of
liberating my ID for the police, pocketed over $100 in cash out of my
wallet. He got me busted for battery and, anti-statist that he was, he
pressed charges.. In 1990, the charges were dismissed, probably because
the statute of limitations had run.
My Los Angeles gig was previously arranged with no thought I’d need a
refuge. I had a legal internship with the American Civil Liberties Union
of Southern California. It was work/study wages (not much more than
minimum wage) but I welcomed the change of scene and rather enjoyed the
legal research and writing I did in support of ACLU victimless-crimes
litigation. I am very good at that sort of thing.
The day before I left for Los Angeles I had a chance encounter with a
curious sequel. I was placing my stuff in storage but encountered
unexpected difficulty in verifying my identity — my passport was packed
away somewhere and my nondriver ID had been stolen by Carlsson and
turned over to the police. Another customer, overhearing my name,
introduced himself. He was Steve Stallone, managing editor of It’s About
Times, and he was there for the same reason I was: he’d been driven from
his apartment for political error by PW’s — in his case by roommate
Marcy Darnovsky. I was dismayed that someone in the milieu knew I was
moving (and the whereabouts of my property, which I later returned to
remove to another place). If the PW’s got wind of what I was doing they
might strike immediately while whatever intelligence they had on me was
still accurate. Much later I heard that they did know where I then
lived.
My departure the next morning was uneventful, but a few days later a
panic-stricken Donna Kossy told me that the PW’s had accused me of
trying to set fire to their office on my last night in the Bay Area. As
usual, I “was seen” pouring gasoline on the door (I am pretty sure that
would not have worked); as usual, no such witness was ever identified.
PW had, it was said, told the story to the FBI (which is puzzling, since
arson is a state, not a Federal crime) and, for good measure, accused me
of having torched the office of music magnate Bill Graham several months
before. No charges were ever filed, and so far as I could tell, there
was no investigation. Through its anarchist stooge Chaz Bufe, PW gave
the tale wide circulation in the pamphlet Listen, Anarchist!
For a fugitive felon, I was unusually conspicuous that summer. There was
a story about me and the other summer intern in the local ACLU
newspaper. Within a few weeks the LA Reader published my Loompanics
Catalog review. I got a mail-drop and, using this local address,
postered extensively. I signed off on a brief submitted to the
California Court of Appeal. I obtained medical service from the county
clinic. I traveled to San Diego to the annual meeting of the Law &
Society Association and presented a paper. I revisited the Bay Area
several times and received several visitors from there. But did I try to
torch the PW office? In the words of one of my law professors, “All I’m
saying is that I’m not saying anything.”
In 1985–1986 I sold a lot of reviews to the yuppie weeklies and The
Abolition of Work and Other Essays came out. I had not, after all, been
erased. New texts and old circulated more widely than ever, usually
with, but not uncommonly even without my help. My personal life did
receive a staggering blow when Donna “Bride of Bobzilla” Kossy left me
in 1987. I’m still not entirely recovered. But I have endured. Most of
the materials in my books Friendly Fire and Beneath the Underground date
from recent years. The graduate education aborted by PW terrorism I have
resumed elsewhere. I’m still poor, but no poorer than usual. I’ve had
the satisfaction of meeting many creative people who were only names to
me, if even that, in the Bay Area. They make me feel, more than ever
before, a part of something.