Other Vices

“Words of Power” (1981) — published in Re/Search (San Francisco), a post-punk journal of pre-punk intellectuality, reprinted in CoEvolution Quarterly — started the trend in my late L.l. phase toward terse, epigrammatic, or formulaic forms (“Ins & Outs,” “20 Questions,” “Declasse(fieds),” etc.). The “Lunatic Fringe Credo” was the Ll’s eleventh-hour self description for an Austrian directory of international “anarchistic” contacts. “Feminism as Fascism” (1982) is the expanded version of a letter (first published in The Spark) suppressed by Toronto’s Kick It Over, a leftist-feminist magazine whose publishers for some strange reason think they aren’t still the Leninists they used to be. “The Exquisite Corpse,” (1984) a letter to the editor, appeared in a left-liberal free yuppie throwaway, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as my last laugh on the Gorilla Grotto’s guru, Gary Warne.

On a dare of mine, Loompanics reprinted the pro-situ manifesto of “communist egoism,” The Right to Be Greedy, and so I supplied a Preface (1983). Although the book not only bombed in the market but got its advertising banned from Reason, Loompanics perversely persisted in its interest in me, and in 1984, at its expense, l attended the Eris Society’s annual Aspen conclave to deliver the diatribe which I have since revised and expanded into “The Libertarian as Conservative.” Despite their ostensible affinity to the anarchaos and paranoiac-critical absurdity of their inspiration, the Principia Discordia, these Erisians are really more like an alternative Trilateral Commission waiting in the wings (the right wing, mostly). My anti-work aspersions met with blank incomprehension from these con-artists, cultists and consultants. At one point I blurted out, “You’re not exactly the salt of the earth, you know.” I’ve upgraded this impasse with excerpts from a suppressed letter to the Libertarian Review in response to the only (right-) “libertarian” text I have ever seen, a book review by John Hospers, that dealt with work itself — by rallying to its defense.

My most recent texts are the “Anarchism” critique (from Popular Reality and a Loompanics supplement) and the Loompanics Catalog review which has appeared in the Voice Literary Supplement, the Chicago Reader, the LA Reader and False Positive. I am currently collaborating with a punk anarchist sociologist behind the Iron Curtain, Gregor Tomc, on a translated anthology of North American “marginal” texts (including fringe libertarians like Erwin Strauss and Samuel Edward Konkin III). This book summarizes and concludes a phase of my activity... but you haven’t heard the last of me.

A Lunatic Fringe Credo

Words of Power

Preface to The Right To Be Greedy

Feminism as Fascism

The Exquisite Corpse: Gary Warne

The Libertarian as Conservative

Anarchy and Other Impediments to Anarchism

Acknowledgements