Believe it or not, it’s not like I’ve stopped reading or paying attention to the world of book publishing. Far from it. Matter of fact, I’m writing a book right now. I will let you know about it in greater detail as time progresses, but for now, let’s just say that it’s in the Year (or in this case, the season) Of Doing Something Vaguely Interesting Memoir genre. It involves my attendance at a slew of countercultural festivals this summer. I ended up writing about one, The Gathering Of The Juggalos, for High Times, and that should be out in the February issue. This turned out to be a life-altering experience – all of them in general did, but this one in particular – and i realize this will probably win me the attention of lulz-loving trolls the world over. So never Mind the Cooks Source; here’s Justin Hampton at the Bookloft, both conveniently ensconced in Western Mass, in case you cared.

(Oh, and btw, in case you were wondering, I think CS got what it deserved. As a freelancer, I definitely have a problem with editors who think a writer’s work isn’t worth a dime, or is theirs to steal. I’m glad the Interwebs feels the same. That said, I’ll miss their FB page and all the righteous crowdsnark it inspired. Good times, yo.)

So there’s a few things I wanted to comment on to start things back out again:

-First, the Pedophile Guide on Amazon: Come on, you should have known this was coming. You open up the floodgates for anyone to get their book out, and you’re going to see things like appear. Give you an example: whilst at the Rainbow Gathering, I was offered a trade for a drug chemistry book written by a fella named Stryke. Later in the summer, a chemist I met at Burning Man told me he collects books like these (though he added he doesn’t make any of these compounds himself), and tells me Stryke is one of the better authors in the field. And word has it that Stryke’s just gotten out of jail, too, so rock on.

Point is that if you can find books like Stryke’s, then opportunities for people to get their hands on all sorts of info will continue to proliferate, whether or not Amazon stocks it in their store. So plan your lives accordingly.

-Indecision Points: I can’t be certain of this, but those stopping by the Bookloft in person, make sure that Eric’s stocking George W. Bush’s new book in the crime section where it belongs, okay? Amnesty International is already howling for Bush’s indictment since he admitted to okaying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture in its pages, so it only makes sense.

-Here’s The Situation: As a former NJ resident and lover of the unintentionally hilarious, I have to mention this unique piece of bookfail, as it caught my eye the minute I saw it in my Twitter feed. Jezebel already posted a chunk of it on their site, and I guarantee that in 20 years time, this will still give the overeducated and insecure a much-needed boost of cultural schaudenfraude.

Oh, and why not follow me on Twitter? I’m impboy over there. Relax, I know you’re not “following” me, but just reading my tweets. The feed gets a bit more personal sometimes, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

Oh, and thanks for having me back. I gotta say, I kinda missed blogging.

A few days ago, W.W. Norton finally published the book. At $195, it doesn’t come cheap. And it’s already sold out of its first edition; Eric tells me he only has three or four copies coming into the store at this time. But let me tell you that this is the sort of book every person who creates one should strive to make (and apparently, Jung did recommend that his clients do so, as a painstakingly detailed New York Times Magazine article recounts.). For all of us turn to knowledge or information to illuminate a world with a truth too often darkened by our fears and misconceptions. Scholars, philosophers, mages and artists have traversed these depths, and apparently, Jung was all of these things. So for Jungian scholars, counterculture fans or lovers of visionary art, this very well may be the publishing event of the year.

Luckily, I’ll be in the NYC area during the month of October, where the Rubin Museum Of Art is exhibiting the book from the 7th to January 25th, and while I’m doubting I’ll be able to take much in the way of pictures… well, we’ll see.

(Much thanks, btw, to documentary filmmaker Mitch Schultz for alerting me to this.)

-Oh, yeah, that goofy pagan-hippie-punk-(insert one or several subcultural marketing titles here) Thing In The Desert. Don’t they do a lot of drugs out there?

-Burning What? I have not heard of it.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, I recommend you check out the official website, as it would take far longer than I have the inclination at this moment to fully explain. As far as those who dismiss it out of hand without ever having attended are concerned, their blithe prejudgments reveal a lot more about them than about the festival itself.

Suffice it to say that no matter who you are, the festival can provide for you. Burning Man is a home for all sorts of freaks, and that includes literary ones as well. Dave Eggers, for one, wrote the foreword for the BMORG-approved Drama In The Desert which appeared back in ’02, and a host of books have appeared over the past decade to document the festival and its wildly diverse culture, most notably This Is Burning Man by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty. I’ve been going since ’99 with only one break in between (that being last year’s “American Dream” – hey, I’m not a flagwaver, what can I tell you?), and this year, themed around Evolution in honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin Of Species, was a shift for me. I made it all about (alright, MOSTLY about) exploring the resources for readers on the playa, and found out a few things you should know about a specific slice of countercultural publishing in the 21st century.

First off, anyone who stopped by Center Camp probably ran into a few copies of Burning Man Live: 13 Years Of Piss Clear, Black Rock City’s Alternative Newspaper. For many years, Burning Man hosted an alternative newspaper entitled Piss Clear (the title pertaining to a sure sign one is drinking enough water in the desert.) and published by dreadlocked glamour puss extraordinaire Adrian Roberts, which cast a basilisk’s eye towards all facets of Burning Man culture, from endless duststorms and absurd fashion mistakes to New Age goofballs and fratboy incursions. Adrian’s since moved on to embrace Mash-Ups as a DJ/promoter of the SF club night Bootie, having the early-adopter foresight to embrace the form before it became mainstream nightclub fodder. But 13 years is a lot of content to sit on, so who can blame him for cashing in?

I ran into Adrian out at the Temple, the city’s spiritual/devotional center hundreds of yards away from the Man himself, on Tuesday. He sounded thankful to finally capture his newspaper for posterity, though not so happy about the deal he received from his publisher, RE/Search (publishers of Modern Primitives, which kickstarted the whole piercing/scarification industry back in the day.).

Speaking about it later off-playa, Adrian gave me this official quote: “Although it’s ostensibly published by RE/Search, this book is 100% self-financed.”

[Note: Adrian got freaked out from what was originally here. Some miscommunication in my discussion with him made me feel I could print a lot of what I reported in an earlier version of this post. Feel free to ask him yourself about the details, as he has a lot to say on the issue.]

Adrian requests that anyone who wants to buy the book should do so directly from him through his website, pissclear.org. He also says he’ll throw in a free copy of the original Piss Clear newspaper along with the deal.

So, has RE/Search merely transformed into a hipster vanity press these days? After Vale’s ill-advised endorsement of neo-swing back in the ’90s, not to mention their Guide To Bodily Fluids, I can believe just about anything, save in the transparency of Vale’s own bodily fluids and business practices. So much for evolution…

On the plus side, Roberts still sounds proud enough of his own work to promote it as best as possible, and all those taped and handwritten requests not to steal the sample books from Center Cafe seem to have worked – well enough that there were still unstolen later on in the week. I only wish I could say the same for my bike.

Right, so for my next trick, get set for a description of my home camp, Entheon Village, and a survey of the thinkers and writers who stopped by to share the love…

I have a copy of The Basketball Diaries, one with an absolutely dreamy picture of Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, but have yet to make it all the way through. But yeah, those were the days, when a guy could write about his drug-soaked youth and have it matter. Top THAT, Frank McCourt, right?

Well, I’m looking forward to Oprah’s retrospective on the man, not to mention Obama’s inevitable name-dropping of a fellow substance-happy hooper at some point. Why should Richard Price and George Pelecanos get all the glory? For me, I’ll be cranking up “People Who Died,” one of the few truly rocking tunes ever written by a career writer, and feel grateful that Carroll actually made it this far. RIP.

Jim Carroll Rocking Out

First off, not sure how seriously I’d take the promotional blurbs coming with the book. People like Irvine Welsh and Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield have grown up listening to Cave’s previous bands, the Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, and probably still attach an inordinate amount of teen idol worship to the man’s output. And if you’ve ever seen his execrable remake of The Wicker Man, you’ll know that Neil LaBute probably shares some women issues with Bunny, so I don’t know if he likes this book for the right reasons or what.

But never fear, because Nick has certainly developed an, um, LIVELY character in Bunny Munro, a charming yet callous sex-addicted beauty supplies salesperson. In the first half of the book, he’s talking down his clinically depressed and maritally neglected wife Libby over the phone one minute, and getting head from a sullen prostitute the next. Pretty soon, you see this guy is good, as only a few hours later, he’s also bagged the hotel waitress serving him brunch. Call it a gift.

For all of the garish sexual fantasies Cave concocts, there’s no small degree of moralizing to the book. Munro’s not above dosing his prey with roofies and one moment shows him coming onto a prepubescent girl in a Pizza Hut, and being a parent himself, Cave clearly illustrates the cumulative wages of Bunny’s sins through a mood-reflecting forelock. His mental decline is precipitated by Libby’s suicide early on in the book, and the panic he faces in confronting his young son, Bunny, Jr. Self-aware enough to know the mess he is, he first tries to pawn his precocious, withdrawn namesake to his angry inlaws, who blame Bunny (correctly, it appears) for his wife’s death. When this fails, he decides to take Bunny, Junior under his wing and show him how to be a salesperson, just like his equally screwed-up father before him.

From here, the activity of the book becomes far more cartoonish, with the goofy Bunny getting his ass handed to him by angry boyfriends, getting wasted, and desperately trying to regain his mojo. In the meantime, his son continues to memorize an encyclopedia Libby gives him, and even receives a visitation from her ghost at one point. Cave doesn’t insist that you take him seriously – apparently, he gets a big kick out of talking about the vaginas of Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavinge, and he gets in a few good jabs at Bunny’s expense (My favorite being a moment where Bunny, driving through his hometown of Brighton, England, gets so turned on by the seedy beachfront tableau that he stops to jerk off into an encrusted sock he keeps under his seat for such occasions). But one also feels we’re supposed to be disturbed by all of this, too, and Bunny is far too exaggerated a character to take very seriously. And this is coming from a guy who had a friend who walked into a “To Catch A Predator” sting house a few years back. That guy was a salesman, too, but a person whose real-life struggles with his personal demons were far too easily concealed to compare with Bunny’s phantasmagoric scenario, which suggests some restraint probably would have made for a far more disturbing and revelatory read. final meeting with his father seems somewhat contrived, as if Cave recognized he had to pull him in at some point to give Bunny’s pathology an explanation And what’s with the “All That Jazz” style deathbed vision? Because Bunny, Jr. is almost as inscrutable and incidental to the reader as he is to Bunny, one only feels so engaged in his story or to his ability to break through Bunny’s rampaging narcissism as he apparently does at the end of the book.

Fan of Nick Cave? Definitely read the book, no matter what I say. Hey, if you’re a fan of sexual deviancy, you’ll be entertained for a bit. But just like any old-school punk, Cave still wants to piss off his parents, and it would appear it’s at the expense of more profound storytelling experience.

“We are seeking high quality photographs of your literary tattoos for an upcoming book. Send us your ink! …

“All images must include the name (or pseudonym) of the tattoo bearer, city and state or country, and a transcription of the text itself, along with its source. For portraits or illustrations, please include the name of the author or book on which it’s based. We’d also like to read a few words about the tattoo’s meaning to you — why you chose it, when you first read that poem or book, or how its meaning has evolved over time. How much (or how little) you choose to say about your tattoo is up to you, but a paragraph or two should do the trick.

Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible to tattoolit@gmail.com.”

Of course, the blog Contrariwise has already beaten them to the punch (and while you’re at it, I’d recommend lines and colors, which is New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer’s online devotion to hard science-inspired tats), but I like the idea of this project all the same, so if you’re so inclined, go for it.

One of the bloggers over at Los Angeles Times’s Shelf Life hoped someone from Shelley Jackson’s “Skin” project would contribute to this project. FYI, this was a literary project where writer Shelley Jackson gave intrepid volunteers a word from her short story “Skin” to tattoo onto their bodies. Well, I got one of these buggers, and although I have yet to send her the photos, I’m pretty proud of it all the same. Don’t think I’m gonna send it to HTMLGiant, but I realize I should send it to her one day. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to give you a peek:

That said, I have to acknowledge Emily Zemler’s commendable work over at their blog and in several events she’s thrown in NYC. Trying to get hipsters to read more than a magazine is trying work, and while many in publishing look to the music industry for clues on how to survive in the digital age, the truth is that it’s apples and oranges. If you self-release in music, you’re hip and “indie”; if you do the same in publishing, it’s a vanity press. And speaking as a former music journalist, I can tell you that the music industry is looking more like publishing every single day, with big labels clinging to their old catalogs for dear life and a financial lead ceiling imposed on indie labels.

Back to the topic at hand, Emily’s throwing another installation of the “Liner Notes” series in New York City, this one featuring San Francisco metal/pop outfit Dredg and Salman Rushdie. Apparently, Dredg liked his essay “Imagine There’s No Heaven: Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen” so much they made an album out of it, setting its themes to the sort of generic aggressive pop music the kids apparently love these days. But apparently, the album has done much to steer fans towards Rushdie’s work, and Rushdie gets it – after all, U2 aren’t kids anymore. So he’s shrewdly participating in this co-promotion scheme. Rushdie gets a chance to indoctrinate more atheists; Dredg gets a chance to brand its teenage angst as literate and “deep.” Win-win situation.

I am told by the event’s publicist that it will be a combination reading-performance dealio, in keeping with other events which have pitted Tegan Quin (Tegan & Sarah) with Augusten Burroughs and Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls) with Neil Gaiman. Any rate, I hope it’s working for the authors and for Emily.

The event’s being held at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, and all proceeds benefit Housing Works, an outreach medical/social care clinic for poor and needy HIV/AIDS patients. It takes place October 1st, at 7:30 p.m., $25.

I refer to that observation at the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” where he notes:

“If one person [sings this song], just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”

Well, I ended up seeing my pal Trish (That’s Big Bad Trish to you, son.) post this right after her tweet on Facebook:

“Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence….
* Post that sentence AS YOUR STATUS. AND POST these instructions in a comment to this status.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST book.”

Not too soon after that, I went to email my friend Bianca. Turned out she had done the same. About four or five people did this as well.

So I realized we’ve got ourselves a silly little movement, and it happened so suddenly, I barely even noticed it. And whaddaya know, it involves people opening up books.

Not watching videos on YouTube.

Not playing XBox 360 with some person you’ll never meet in Lisbon and posting said Pwnage on YouTube like anyone would care.

No, just getting them to look at the book. So maybe there is a movement going on after all.

So here’s a sentence from a book I’ll be talking about very soon, in my very first REAL post on Steampunk, Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age.”

“Power supplies were much more potent.”

Just ask Alice.