From: Dwebb9@aol.com Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 13:25:30 -0400 Name: Don Webb Author of Magazine reviewed: Various Editor of Magazine: Ann Kennedy Translator of book reviewed: Title: _The Silver Web_ #12 Name of press: Buzzcity Press Address of small press: POB 38190 Tallahassee, FL 32315 Year of publication: 1995 Cloth and/or paper: Paper Number of pages: Price: Paper: $4.95 Cloth: _The Silver Web_ is a magazine of surrealism. One wonders what surrealism is today -- what intrusions of the absolute other may be found in juxtaposition with the commonplace. Unfortunately I watched CNN for an hour before I began reading The Silver Web, and I think that juxtaposition of the unusual and the "normal" is now very commonplace -- and neither surrealism nor science fiction as they now stand have the power to redeem and revivify our language. However, this is not prejudice from my avant-pop camp, none of us have lived up to the ambitious call for Sur-fiction that Raymond Federman issued some years ago. It's easy to write tales of despair, but hard to write them well. This made _The Silver Web_ hard to get through. Had it not been for two very successful experiments in this issue, I might write _The Silver Web_ off my list. The first story, "The Reflection of Ghosts" by Jeffery Thomas is a pretty good meditation on the relationship between an artist and his art with a memorable opening scene. Drew, the artist, finds one of his clones dead in the gutter in front of his studio and begins pouring a preservative over the corpse to create a neo-Pompeiian relic. The story continues with Drew's feelings about how various of his clones are treated. Eventually he creates himself as a woman and filled with the mixture of self-love/self-hate that is inevitable for the artist that involves his image in his art -- comes to learn to love and then destroy her as an image of himself. A bit heavy-handed with New Wave angst, Thomas shows himself as being daring -- a very rare thing among today's rack fodder. The second story, a very short pice by Ian Compton called "Absolutely Normal," fell flat. There was some real surrealism in the description of the mad family -- snake charming mother and taxidermist father -- but most of the story tried to show the world as a crazy place with radical feminist bombers and flesh-eating diseases. The point of the vignette, in a mad world only mad art is redeeming, is I would think a given for _The Silver Web'_s audience. The next story "Antag/Protag" by Alan M. Clark and Peteso is an S+X game story. You write a story, then you replace every second noun with the noun X number of entries before or after it in the dictionary. The story is told in alternating riffs from the two title characters, and is a humorous rural rivalry tale. A sample sentence, "He wasted no time rounding up a great number of stray legs and was just itching to pour a fat piggly, water spot over the head of our hometown queen." Like cut-ups, I tend to find these more fun to do than to read. The mechanical aspect of certain dadaist games was probably more interesting before the advent of computers. Sue Storm gives us "Just Another Story" as our next tale. The story does not have Storm's usual close control of language, but her peculiar image of the rat-king as a sexual-savior existing in the dreams of both her fictional author and her author's own fictional creation is wonderfully disturbing. There's a touch of autobiography that most writers of the fantastic will appreciate, "Her records and her writing were the only things that kept her alive, she believed, as she slouched through adolescence, staying as far as possible from the house she'd been born in as possible." The peculiar nature of the writer's mental life comes through, the need for suffering -- which consumes her. I guess this is the young Werther issue. "The Hanging Man" by Tom Piccirilli is an interesting study in the ordeal. The hero, who has a double history of being the object of bound abuse and the object of a game of psychological abuse, is socially coerced into taking the part of the "hanged man" in a bit of grotty performance art. This leads him to much thought on his past, on how he has been an object (rather than a subject) -- at the last moment he decides not to play the part -- but is forced to nevertheless. The ordeal doesn't transform and the continuation of his rebellion after the play doesn't end his objecthood. Although like the other fiction here -- a bit too introspective -- the failure of resolution does give the piece a dark edge. R.L. Rummel's "Pieces of the Moon" is the best piece in the issue and should be anthologized in some of the Year's Best collections. The remarkably prim Dresden Skinner spots an equally dapper, but mysterious traveler in the subway. At first he is full of admiration for this member of his tribe -- forced like himself to travel amongst the scum of the earth -- but he is horrified when the mystery man begins trimming his toenails. The toenails become talismans for transformation, and while the others leave into beautiful worlds of their own making, Dresden is stuck with the dreary worlds he has always lived in. The story is an excellent metaphor for the place of genre fiction in our world -- so easily despised by the standardized culture, yet for the few who find it through whatever piece of luck, a gateway of dream. This is R. L. Rummel's first sale, extremely well done Mr. Rummel! "Remnants of the Virago Crypto-System" by Geoffery Maloney is a tale of the break down of communication on an alien world, where images of communication systems -- particularly the alien Crypto-System tantalize and frustrate in their almost clear communication. The house-based systems stand for women, with their Y-shape -- their questions about humanity (such as "Why do they kill children?"). I'm not drawn to the women as alien metaphor, and will have to pass on this one. Cathryn Pisarski presents us with "Horrible Story" next. This is a story of misplaced love. A woman dies, but decides to remain in the earth and rot rather than seek an afterlife. She returned to her female companion into a relationship that seems to be no more dead now than when she was alive. "At the old Ball Game" by Nathan Walpow is a series of what he presumes to be unusual images in the context of a Dodgers game. Even Godzilla's appearance in the top of the eighth failed to arouse any interest in ne. "Cars" by Bruce Taylor uses the same narrative strategy as the previous tale, but with slightly better results since the narrator at least has some involvement with the process. A hitchhiker is picked up by a series of increasingly surreal and threatening drivers. The last full tale is Alan Casey's "The Bee Keepers," the only genuinely interesting piece of surrealism in the issue. Casey understands that prose is not a flat surface upon which one presents a collage of images -- but is in fact a performance through time. The long, disturbing and painstakingly detailed of story of Amber Rose into a honeycombed bee womb is effective. Alan Casey's is the sort of story I had hoped to find when I opened _The Silver Web: A Magazine of the Surreal_. The level of self reference in these tales is high, reflecting a growing discontent among young writers with the world -- hopefully this inward vision will turn into a strength for dealing with the coming age. This coming Age will be increasingly _dominated_ in which subtle and not-so-subtle forces and technologies (electronic media, computer nets, etc.) will impose increasing ORDER (standardization of all we call "culture"). Now as never before writers must create new avenues and methods of communication to circumvent these increasing forces of homogenization and external control. If The Silver Web turns its attention to true experiments such as Casey's and Rummel's, it may be a place of creation of such new avenues. .