With each issue, the editors make “MPD” stand for something different. This issue is the Mostly Pretentious Drivel issue. At first I thought, well they’re not really going to publish an issue full of mostly pretentious drivel. That’s a bad thing. As the editors themselves say in their opening editorial, “Who the fuck wants to read drivel?” Then I thought maybe they were going to publish stuff that was so bad it was good. But the stuff inside isn’t all that bad. Some of it’s bad. But then drivel isn’t really bad. It’s just…drivel. And some of the stuff in here is actually very good. “Dad’s Pills” by Greg Levonian is the furthest thing from drivel I could imagine. So really, nothing in this issue, with the exception of a couple of editorials, has even the remotest connection to the idea of drivel. Anyway, MPD is free, so it’s not like you’ll be wasting good money if you buy it, and it takes about 20 minutes to read cover to cover, so it’s not like you’ll be wasting a lot of time reading it, and there’s some pretty good stories in here, including one by James Spyker called “The Power of Television”, which actually maybe, now that I think about it, derives its humour from being just so much drivel.
lit zine / 32 pages / Main Creators: Tamara Fairchild, Grant F. Wilkins (editors) / Free at bookstores, $1.50 by mail, 4 for $5, lifetime sub for $20 / 81 Saddlehorn Cresc., Kanata, ON, K2M 2B1, email: [email protected]