review of "Three-Fisted Tales of `Bob'" from MONDO 2000 no.2
reviewed by "Doug St. Clair"
Somebody up there must like the SubGeniuses. And that's ironic, because they
sure haven't gone out of their way to appease God or any other deities - not
even their own J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, toward whom the display a puzzling attitude
combining extreme distrust, forced or at least reluctant worship, and sudden,
unexpected spastic spurts of blind, unquestioning faith. That weird ambiguity
has never been made more *clearly vague* than in their enigmatic third book,
*Three Fisted Tales of "Bob"*.
Whereas *The Book of the SubGenius* is their bible, and *High Weirdness by
Mail* (a nonfiction exploration of kooks and crackpots) their encyclopedia,
*Three Fisted Tales of "Bob"* is more like SubGenius pornography. Or
children's bedtime stories, as the case may be. (There's actually nothing
really sexy here, just a once-removed view of literary sex cliches.) It's an
anthology of stories by twenty authors, chronicling various crises in the life
of "Bob" Dobbs, the legendary Saint of Sales and founder of the Church of the
SubGenius.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Church, you *must* find a copy of *The
Book of the SubGenius*. A parody of religions, cults, occult systems, all
forms of politics, ritual, belief systems... have I left anybody out?... It's
simply the funniest book to come out in the 80's.
Like "cyberpunk", SubGenius is not just a genre, it's an active lifestyle,
or mindstyle, propped up by books, radio shows, tapes, fanzines, T-shirts.
It's related to, yet opposite from, cyberpunk in that it's relentlessly
critical yet often eagerly low-tech. It represents the people who could
choose, but choose to remain primitive. SubGenius is less like new appliance
weaponry and more like dirt, old broken-up dead leaves, and the bugs crawling
around in the mulch. Something that won't go away. Something you can fight but
never defeat. It's more down-home, more good-ol'-boy, more Southern, and
possibly wiser for its informality, than most other forms of literature or
media philosophy. It's also mysterious and archetypal. It is a celebration of
inexplicability, a rejoicing in what we *still don't know*.
It's also a celebration of imperfection. It clings in a very ornery way to
the conviction that human beings are hilariously imperfect, but the very idea
of striving for perfection (as taught in so many New Age schools) is pure
foolishness. "Bob" Dobbs isn't smart, or even *good*. He's just lucky. Slack
*is* luck, and it's usually low-tech - though certainly not to the exclusion
of playing with electronic toys. SubGenius is a sort of bedmate to cyberpunk.
The two genres share both audiences and creators - but SubGenius is actually
intensely retro at heart. Its unspoken philosophy places the primitive
aborigine who sits in the mud arhythmically hooting away on some weird flute
way above the hyper, wired rebel battling it out in cyberspace. It doesn't
deny technology; it simply doesn't *require* it. It's also non-political or,
rather, above politics. No way is "Bob" going to save the world. His function
is to make it *worth* saving.
Although the Church is probably too strange to ever be truly commercial, the
Church elders have demonstrated some savvy in keeping their output just slick
enough to stay in the marketplace. (This year they have produced two new
books, one comic, and an amazing video, none of them ready for prime time, but
all of them *available* from big-city stores, thus placing them exactly, if
uncomfortably, between underground and mainstream.) For this book, they
recruited many writers whose names should be very familiar to MONDO readers:
Robert Anton Wilson, John Shirley, William S. Burroughs, Mark Mothersbaugh,
Lewis Shiner, Paul Mavrides. The majority of the stories, however, are by the
"core unknowns" of the Church.
The stories bounce from poetic to realistic to surreal to juvenile to lofty,
yanking the reader from one paradigm to another without warning. They aren't
even all "stories". Burroughs' piece is an essay. Mothersbaugh's are one-
paragraph koans with sicko illustrations. The psychedelic ravings by surreal
Arkansas savant Janor Hypercleats are a sort of twisted hick-mutant monologue/
rant. Brooks Carruthers offers a one-act play, and several SubGenii present
divine revelations and prophecies in scriptural form. Waves Forest's novella
is engrossing, but is essentially a vehicle for textbook specifics about
alternative energy and medicine, complete with a disguised bibliography at the
end.
The normally "serious" cyberpunk writers like Shirley and Shiner are herein
being *funny* for a change. But it's in the stories by the SubGenius Hierarchy
"Inner Adepts" that the mordant, very black humor on which the Church is
predicated comes bubbling over the brim of the cauldron. The excerpts from Pau
Mavrides' *World Without Slack* novel-in-progress probably represent the
pinnacle of Dobbsian morbid yuks. Mavrides is generally known for his
graphics, but here he demonstrates so thick a talent for the sardonic that it
couldn't be cut with a chainsaw. (His story opens with a sadistic Jesus
preparing his flying saucer fleet to invade Earth... for *revenge*.) Hal
Robins - one of the geniuses behind the Church's radio outreach - gives us a
Lovecraftian takeoff that is more Lovecraftian than Lovecraft. Performance
artist Michael Peppe creates very effective cognitive dissonance with his
philosophical discourse between God and "Bob". The only truly "cyberpunk"
story is told not by the cyberpunk contributors, but by Guy C. Deuel, a real-
life mercenary.
There's also a delightful pirate yarn by David N. Meyer, and Ivan Stang's
novella *The Third Fist*, by far the longest and dumbest of the stories.
Stang, the impresario of the SubGenius talent pool, was the editor of the
book, and one must assume he was trying to prove something by making his story
almost the diametric opposite of what we've been led to expect from him. His
action-adventure yarn, in which Dobbs travels through time to save the
universe (battling Nazis, dinosaurs, UFOs, the U.S. Cavalry, and other "bad
guys" on the way), is more like a treatment for a George Lucas children's
movie than a short story. Riddled with cliches, juvenile sex scenes, and
junior-high-level violence, it's both an effective parody of old pulp kids'
adventures like Doc Savage, and the dumbest, most retrograde piece of
literature imaginable. On the other hand, it's probably the only story that
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs himself would like.
Stang, in fact, is a main character in half the stories, including his own.
But he's not exactly presented in a favorable light, not even by himself. He
seems to represent - both to the other authors and to himself - the carrier of
a virus of normality that keeps cheapening Dobbs' pure innocence by trying to
organize it and profit from it. A necessary evil. He has evidently dragged
himself and his cronies into the mythos in a very deliberate, calculated way,
perhaps to further blur the distinction between the picture itself, the frame
around the picture, and the wall on which the picture is hung. Or maybe he
wants to make sure a single, live, accessible human name is identified with
the SubGenius monster/product which, with its countless unauthorized fanzine
progeny, is a trademark nightmare. Self-effacing and egomaniacal at the same
time, he has taken the bull by the horns and turned it back towards its own
tail. If Stang gets rich and famous off this maneuver, his cynical theories
about celebrityhood will have been proven. If he doesn't, he will at worst
have made an asshole of himself in a noble but failed experiment on public
perception of the artist vs. the artwork. It's almost as if he dares the
SubGenius "experiment" to pull off the impossible: to define not only itself,
but its parameters for definition... to abolish relativity and defeat the
puzzle of Schroedinger's cat or prove that it cannot do so.
In all of the tales, Dobbs is savior, dolt, and devil simultaneously. *He
is, at once, myth and reality*, and the best stories are both horror and
comedy. The SubGeniuses seem to be engaged in a subtle mindfuck using the all-
American illusion of blatant, cheap, money-grabbing crassness - to both parody
culture and grub a little money. It's a thin line to tread. In some of the
live performances that I've seen, in some of the radio shows and in their
infrequent newsletter, *The Stark Fist of Reality*, it barely comes off. But
in this book, and in the original *Book of the SubGenius*, it strikes home
like nothing else you'll find in the humor *or* the metaphysics section of
your local book store.
