The Old Fart

An old fart by any other name: for a while there we thought we had lost The Old Fart, the magazine for curmudgeons, but learned last month that it is still with us, rather more primly named T.O.F., but still full of curmudgeonly stuff and great merchandise. Another old magazine worth checking out this month is the solipsistically named This Magazine, subtitled the Sex and Spies issue. Good spy stuff, good sex stuff, good censorship stuff, and more particularly, good Celebrity Poet stuff in a piece by Lynn Crosbie called "The Poetry of a Playmate." Crosbie traces the current celebrity poetry (ie. poetry not by celebrated poets but rather by real celebrities) phenom back to the late eighties when an actor named Michael Des Barres began organizing poetry readings in L.A. for stars only, who he claims have a "unique perspective, as opposed to the garret-isolated, misunderstood genius perspective." Among celebrity poets quoted and examined by Crosbie: Leonard Nimoy, Gary Gilmore, Drew Barrymore and Dorothy Stratten. "Why do celebrities write poetry?" Crosbie asks. "Is it because they know they look fabulous, even under the most appalling circumstances?" It's time, she says, breathing new life into literary criticism, "to create a new system of poetics, a revision of T. S. Eliot's approach, whereby the celebrity that creates is separate from the reader who suffers." Another fine mag that just keeps on going is Mondo Hunkamooga, a title guaranteed to astonish your friends if you leave it on the coffee table or the bathroom reading rack. Number ten has just appeared, which makes us wonder when we saw number one: ten years ago? Stewart Ross is the editor and he's not afraid of giving his readers lots of time to absorb each issue. MH is the voice of the living underground, the true small press scene, which also just keeps on going. It features the redoubtably lower-case jw curry, whose notes and reviews are always quirky and have actual personality (a rare thing) in them. Runs of MH are pretty short (170 copies this issue), so you should secure your own copies by sending ten dollars for twelve issues (years to go before you renew) to S. Ross at Box 141 Station F, Toronto M4Y 2L4.