Alan Kaufman, ed.
The Outlaw Bible of American Essays
Thunder's Mouth Press, New York

The so-called "outlaw bible of American essays" recently published by Thunder's Mouth is definitely misleading; it is not "the" outlaw bible of anything. It is, however, an outlaw bible — and one, I'm disappointed to say — that serves to canonize cronies and associates rather than offer an honest and representative sample of the key players in the American outlaw essayist tradition. First of all, 30 to 40% of the writers in this anthology are Jewish, and New-York-centric at that. So we're not getting the broadest possible spectrum of voice that the definite article — "the" — suggests we're getting.

I mean, how could any respectable outlaw bible of American essays exclude Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Abbey, and Abbey Hoffman? Or other influential bad-asses who broke the rules on and off the streets of culture as well as in the smack of their prose? Granted, Kaufman's club does include Iceberg Slim, Hubert Selby Jr., William Burroughs, Eldridge Cleaver, and a few other celebrated authors, but overall, their bashitude is pretty limp compared to the misanthropic luddite approaches featured in the two preceding outlaw bibles of the series (The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature).

Let's not beat around the bush: A true outlaw bible of American essays (deserving of such a title) would include Kathy Acker, Timothy Leary, Jim Carroll, Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk, Brett Easton Ellis, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Bill Burroughs Jr., John Steinbeck IV, Mark Vonnegut, Antler, Ward Churchill, Howard Zinn, the S.C.U.M. and uni-bomber manifestoes, Andrei Codrescu and Ed Dorn (for their polemic publications), that ambassador guy with the spywife who exposed the B.S. of WMDs, and even some old-school writers of literary nonfic — i.e., Thoreau, Whitman (his intros), Twain, and — since speeches are essays too, —Faulkner! And what about runaway slave narratives and MLK and Malcolm X? And oh yeah, how about that very first innovative instance of CNF Amlit... circa 1776? The list goes on.

There are, however, some moments of trashing the Man worthy of mention in this book. Like Allen Ginsberg's unusually aggressive statement regarding the Academies: "poetry has been attacked by an ignorant and frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, and the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn't know poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight." (41) John Sinclair's account of the MC5's trouble with the fuzz ("Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker!") was also a colorful trip, as was Mike Golden's portrait of D.A. Levy, Kurt Vonnegut's "Obscenity" (excellent!), Annie Sprinkle's "Hellfire Club," and Ray Charles' justification for not wearing rubbers so as to propagate a whole bunch of bastards. Michelle Tea's "Transmission from Camp Trans" (having to do with the oppression of trannies by feminists and lesbians at the Michigan Women's Music Festival) was also an intriguing piece, but it went on way too long and could've benefited from some strategic editing.

The most quixotic of the essays in this collection, though, was definitely Paul Krassner's "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book," which is allegedly made up of passages from William Manchester's The Death of a President, which were "marked for deletion months before Harper & Row sold the serialization rights to Look magazine." (113) Check this out:

During the tense flight from Dallas to Washington after the assassination, she [Jacqueline Kennedy] inadvertently walked in on Johnson as he was standing over the casket of his predecessor and chuckling....

"I'm telling you this for the historical record," she said, "so that people a hundred years from now will know what I had to go through."

She corroborated Gore Vidal's story about Lyndon Johnson, continuing "That man was crouching over the corpse, no longer chuckling but breathing hard and moving his body rhythmically. At first I thought he must be performing some mysterious symbolic rite he'd learned from Mexicans or Indians as a boy. And then I realized — there is only one way to say this — he was literally fucking my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat. He reached a climax and dismounted. I froze. The next thing I remember, he was being sworn in as the new president" (116).

The author's credibility, of course, is then called into question, because A) if this is from Manchester's book, why is Krassner getting the by-line? and B) No fucking way!

Hence, I went digging for some information and found that Krassner is a satirist who gained attention back in the sixties for this very piece — which imagined "censored material of a far more scandalous nature than anything that could possibly have been the case" (Answers.com).

Meaning Kaufman tried to pull a fast one in this book — which does not bode well for a resource readers expect to be based on perceptions of truth. That is, since the current question of where one draws the line between fiction and creative nonfiction is always part of the pop dialogue when discussing the dynamics of the essay, everyone knows it's okay for an author to embellish a bit, but it's a much more serious breach of trust between the publisher and the public when bullshit gets marketed as fact.

Of course, Montaigne and Ginsberg had their effect on the essay by declaring it open for interpretation with haphazard comments like (to loosely paraphrase), "It's whatever you want it to be." The result being a whole lot more confusion than there would've been if these charlatans would've just kept their noses to the grindstone, rather than coming up for air and shooting off their motor-mouths before the genre of creative nonfic even had an identity.

So let's get something straight: Creative nonfiction, and especially the essay, are not whatever any old jackass says they are! First of all, to establish some ground rules via the vast generalization, the (creative nonfiction) essay is essentially true; that is, since fiction is basically the realm of the imagination injected with truth, creative nonfiction (the opposite of fiction) is therefore the realm of truth injected with embellishments — since it comes from a perspective or belief which may have faults as well as poetic license. Because swiftboaters aim to deceive.

In this case, it seems that Kaufman's purpose was taken out of context. Consequently, for this ethical offense, Kaufman and Thunder's Mouth now find themselves in the company of James Frey, George W. and other lowly manipulators of what an audience expects to be sincere.

Secondly, creative nonfiction, and especially the essay (which is representative of the genre) is not whatever some ass-clown says it is... genre-wise! Sure, it's form is open to experimentation (as demonstrated in John D'Agata's The Next American Essay), but the essay is primarily prose. Cross pollenization sometimes happens, but the essay is not sculpture, it is not song, it is not a series of photographs; it is, for the most part, literal. Because what we're talking about here is literature; meaning something that gets read.

So if we're to allow dumb punk art like Fly's second-rate sketches of coffee-shop loiterers accompanied by typo-riddled blatherings to pass as "the essay," then literature has no boundaries at all. And if that's the case, a comic book can be drama, a can of beer can be fiction, and a red wheel barrow can be poetry. Which is why we need to set some limits on what qualifies as CNF — especially when books like this come out and meddle with the idea of what can honestly be qualified as art.

Oh I can already hear the moan. But go ahead, let it rip. Any publicity is good publicity, that's what I say. So take me to task, you naysayers — but just make sure your sweat is worth the effort and doesn't confuse the genre further. Because I'm declaring "Case closed, Bub!" Yep, this here's a manifesto — unless proven otherwise. And here's the Grand Proclamation for a New Nonfiction Generation:

CREATIVE NONFICTION IS AN EVER-ELUSIVE STILL-EVOLVING BASTARDCHILD IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTHS THAT CONCEIVED ITS MOSTLY MAINSTREAM MASK BENEATH WHICH SEETHES THE POET COUSIN OF DRAMA & FICTION INFUSED W/ WHAT IS LITERARY — AN APPARITION WE ARE ALWAYS TRYING TO ILLUMINATE!!!

FURTHERMORE, CREATIVE NONFICTION HAS A TUDE OR APPROACH WHICH IS INFORMED BY ITS HISTORY AND THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT "CREATIVE" AND THEREFORE THE NUDESCAPE OF THE ARTIST. IT (CNF) IS: ESSAYS, MEMOIRS, TRAV-WRITINGS, REVIEWS, FLASHES, CHUNKS, ARTICLES, POLEMICS, RANTS, APOLOGIES, COMMENTARIES, EPIPHANIES & EXPOSÉS, OCCASIONAL COLLAGES AND NARRATIVES OF EVERY DIMENSION EXCLUDING WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE SPIRIT OF CACA!!!

So make of that what you will and back to the book:

Wherein Sue Coe's vegetarian rhetoric was informative and entertaining, but not so outside-the-law as readers of "outlaw lit" expect. And the same goes for the two pieces on music by Hank Bordowitz, which don't resonate at all. Just like the random recycled book intros and liner notes included in this "bible," which trumpet forth the reality that these pieces were not written to be essays as much as they were written to be appendages, so were lumped among for reasons of convenience.

Likewise, there's nothing outlaw at all when Bell Hooks gets didactic and slings her absolute academic rhetoric of love. In fact, this is the type of pure boring regurgitation that belongs in COMP 101 for the purpose of provoking class discussion (this, however, is not a critique as much as it is a suggestion for a practical application for making lemonade). My point being:

Sloppy editing aside (O the terrible typos of the "outlaw" series!), it's a lot more difficult to blast France these days now that there are dissertations on Johnny Rotten and blue jeans are mainstream (see James Sullivan's essay on "the fabrication of the teenager"). The result being, there's plenty reason to be bummed out by the way in which Thunder's Mouth has come to define "outlaw lit" in America, via Kaufman's cliquish canon.

Because all in all, this here "bible" is just another pile of opportunistic pigshit — but with a few tasty kernels of corn in it. So munch on that, you Pomo mofos defining the genre according to what's permissible rather than the legacy of what's been established — and let's look at assembling an anthology as an act of responsibility.

So there!