The male characters in most of these stories are pretty one- dimensional, but one-dimensionality is by far the preferred status when you take a look at the women in this zine. The woman are nothing but a collection of holes. In one story, a man turns himself into a giant lollipop because it’s the only way he can get the woman he loves to stick him in her mouth. In another, a man gets angry with his wife when he discovers she has had a fish living in her vagina all her life. Another man finds himself on a bus, picking the nose of a witch-like enchantress. A woman is captured by secret service agents, stripped, strapped to a table and subjected to number of forms of torture, one of which involves the insertion of “trained spiders” (what the fuck is a trained spider) into her vagina. There’s something vaguely sinister about a magazine that claims its only aim is to please and entertain and then goes on to devote a large portion of its space to denouncing what it sees as literary pretension. There’s a not-so-hidden agenda here that was like a bad aftertaste in the first issue of the Rabelaisian, but which is pretty unmistakable in this, the second issue. In the “Forward to the Reader” the editor tells us: “We refuse to glut your brain with boring, yet intelligent and aesthetically correct, pieces of prose supplied by complicated plots and incomprehensible words, which serve but to confuse the reader and feed the puppy-writer’s vanity. We did not write the following tales to teach you moral or intellectual or aesthetic lessons, or to evoke such vapid and robotic responses as, ‘How interesting, how thought-provoking.'” And in the “factual” article entitled “Vincent Van Goug” the narrator — who shaved off Van Goug’s moustache, thereby causing Van Goug’s decline into madness — sums up his monologue thus: “I was alarmed by the thought that this vile specimen should prove a role-model for generations of future loafers…parasites who would make the same extravagant claim, that they are artists, and live in idleness at our expense. This Van Goug fellow was a perverter of an honest trade.” Combine the Rabelaisian crusade against the perversion of the literary trade with this woman-as-orifice thing, and you begin to wonder just who the hell these Rabelaisians are.
litzine / 8 pages / Main Creator: John Wright (editor) / free / 2772 Fairview Cresc., Vancouver, BC, V6T 2B9, email:[email protected]