In the mail today: tear sheets from ZYX! ZYX is a stapled broadsheet, edited by Arnold Skemer. Writes Jacqueline Karp in New Hope International, of Skeemer: “How could I have lived so long without Arnold Skemer’s editorials?”.

Alongside reviews of The Kingdom Of Farfelu & Paper Moons and New Phobe (from Unbearable Books), was a great review of Skip Fox’s At That. Writes Skemer:

This is a fiction of odd vignettes, bizarre excursions into human perversity, idiosyncratic screeds, peculiar closets of strange possessions, a crazy grab bag of odds and ends, a curiosity shop in a lunatic asylum, a morbid sewage of ntellectual observation that breaks all the rules of “well wrought Fiction,” (to use a cliche). The first thing you notice about AT THAT is the high quality of the verbiage. This is not facile writing but is multiple cuts above the ordinary. Each “vignette,” appropriately numbered in some sequential that can’t be readily fathomed, exudes a complex and muscular verbal structure that occasionally requires real work on the part of the reader, but yet sometimes does not, simply listening to the run of imprecations, word baths of contempt, paroxysms of dissatisfaction. This is not a segmented tale or even a non-sequential tale at all but rather like listening to a very verbal stranger who has had a bit to drink and is unloading on much of what disgusts him in the world. This is not a bad thing. In such circumstances it is fun reliving the convulsive maledicta of an extended freak show, a rhapsody of exacting dissections on the days and week thereafter. There are times when the reader is not always receptive to these endless successions of bitter wit. My advice is to save it for a day when you are. On a few occasions I found it tedious. Fox falters sometimes and resorts to lists of things or goes down a blind alley. And now, a provocative quote: “How do you like the view from the anus, its folds like little waving arms of a petroglyphic bug or canoe, view of the preconscious wagging its little heads, an anal eye as portal between fossa, hint of vistas beyond, to which many are drawn, then fiercely accommodated with the postmodern lobotomy, television, Alzheimer’s in installments, cerebral liquescence dissolving neural plaque like stripping the hallways of high school in dreams, each evening the nibbling between lobes, you can barely hear it, an ambient whine.”

It occurs to the reviewer that this “fiction” is an excellent model for those wishing to get as far away from the conventional ways of fiction, towards a “commonplace book” of oddness, random thoughts, a diary of observations of an insane world. There are no characters that develop, no plot, just the cavalcade of a bizarre kaleidoscopic world of incongruity and the observation of the bizarre.

Thanks to ZYX & Arnold Skemer for the review!