Publishing's Feral Child

Adam Parfrey sheds light on the dark sides of life.

Brian Doherty from the November 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

A couple of years ago, I commissioned and published Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State, by Jim Redden. There was more and more going on in the Clinton administration regarding loss of privacy, and I was personally upset by these ideas. Hillary Clinton said privacy was overrated -- what's going on here? Students were being instructed to tattle on other students. What my father's generation had been told was the right thing to do is now turned on its head. You're supposed to be a rat or a snitch, and that's a good thing. You can perhaps prevent a Columbine from happening.

A lot of this is going on in relation to the very sorry drug war. People are creating problems for innocent people because they find that snitching gets them a less dramatic prison sentence if they turn in others who may be innocent. That is a very bad situation, created as a result of the advocacy of snitching. It has become a social problem and a political defect.

Other political books Feral House has done include THE REVOLUTION®: Quotations from Revolution Party Chairman R.U. Sirius, which came out in 2000. Sirius is a prankster; he calls himself a "cyber-terrorist." Especially in an election year, I thought it would be amusing to put out a book that questions the system as it exists politically and to put it out in the format of Mao Tse-Tung's Red Book. Not that it was a communist tract, but to get people's attention and make them interested in what he's saying. The humor element is usually totally removed from politics, and I wanted to put that back in.

John Zerzan's Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002) is another one. He's a leftist, but he sees the problems with that as well. I'm not a fan of that kind of political structure or belief system, but I am a fan of John Zerzan's writing. He's a provocative writer on contemporary problems with technology. He's an anti-technology anarchist, and for some reason he was picked up on by these anti-globalization kids who threw chairs through the windows at Starbucks franchises.

Also, the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote to him. Kaczynski was influenced by John's work, and I found that remarkable too. I don't even believe in most of what Zerzan is saying, but he's a provocative and interesting writer. I think it's a problem when people dismiss or do not want to read something they don't think they would abide by 100 percent.

Reason: Do you think that the work Feral House does is marginalized?

Parfrey: I'd like to indulge myself by saying I've pushed the envelope a little farther and some things are discussed in certain ways more than they would have been if I were not there. But I'm pushed into a pigeonhole called the "underground." I don't consider myself underground. My books go into the same bookstores as ones from Random House. My books sit side by side in chain stores with books published by Judith Regan. They aren't sold like old erotica, under a coat. They're in bookstores, man! I have business meetings. I'm this middle-class guy who deals with the same system that the mainstream goes through. But some of the books are just considered "too much" to deal with, yes, even if they are ordered by major stores and in every Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Reason: Why do you think that other publishers tend to avoid the more controversial and sensational topics Feral House covers?

Parfrey: There are several reasons. They don't want to be tied into material that does not look beneficial to their reputation and standing in this small world of publishing. Doing weird, offbeat stuff doesn't necessarily make them look good. It might be that they don't even recognize there's a sales interest in it. Another reason might be a career fear on the part of an editor: What if your boss doesn't see the value of a more controversial book idea?

Reason: How does it affect you being in Los Angeles, away from the center of the publishing industry in New York?

Parfrey: Not being in New York hurts my ability to get reviews. But it helps being outside that world in the sense that I'm not caught up in the mechanism of it. What happens in the publishing world is that a lot of middle management people steal from each other. They always use the phrase "what's hot" -- what does that mean? It's what people are stealing from each other at that moment.

Reason: How have the past decade's changes in the book business affected you?

Parfrey: The big chains have opened up the possibility of selling more of certain titles. Few titles break even, but a few titles do better than break even. It's a bipolar situation. I try to put books out that are good as books -- that aren't necessarily going to have the same effect if read on the Internet. I'm interested in photographs and books with a lot of illustrations that assist the text. I'm more interested in design now than before. I have to think about what makes a book different from the Internet, about what makes it compelling to own this thing.

The Internet provides so much more reading matter for everybody that people feel overwhelmed. So in some ways the Internet has not benefited publishing. But in other ways it has, because it gets the word out on our books more prominently, both good and bad. We get a number of orders through our Web site from people who wouldn't be able to find these books in the middle of nowhere. But it's not good if people feel overwhelmed with data smog and can't even bear to look at another sentence.