Acceptance: Aberration Labyrinth

http://aberrationlabyrinth.blogspot.com/


This is a relatively new zine rocking the hard edge of anti-conformity. From their bios, I get the impression the editors are kinda apathetic in the way that a shark is apathetic after it has eaten a lot of seals; but if a new taste comes along the pendulum of passion swings the other way, from zip to zillions. But that’s just me.

The poetry on the site is extremely good. For ex, read some of Paul Hostovsky’s most gapingly lurid work here. In, general, there’s a rough vortex of sex, depravity, angst and unanswered questions, all dragging the reader into the raw truth of how fucked up society is.

You know, I’m probably saying more about me than about Aberration Labyrinth in this blog entry; but in a way that is a compliment. When a zine becomes a Rorschach test for the reader, it has managed, through the teeth of its offerings, to bite into a vulnerable worldview. We don’t get bitten enough in this society. Not in the right way, anyhoo.

The editors are Jessica Gleason and Ben Mohr. Gleason might be a bit of a feminist, or not, as well as a half-jaded wanderer of realms brothelesque, based on a poem of hers (“Female Chauvinist Pig”) I found in Boyslut:

http://boyslut.wordpress.com/tag/aberration-labyrinth/

I took this as, in part, a liberatory poem, a woman getting angry and finding her own unique sexual energy and voice as our culture struggles, still, to escape the 50’s June Cleaver persona: chaste, wonderbread and genteel. Maybe I’m reading idealism where I shouldn’t. Who knows. There probably shouldn’t be any simple answer.

Ben Mohr seems totally insane, based on his bio, but in a creative and productive way. He has invented the Omnigun, “the gun that fires more guns.” I’m hoping this is a satirical commentary on our society’s addiction to violence, with all the obsession, destruction, idolization, and sheer stupidity that implies. Who knows. There probably shouldn’t be any simple answer.

The editors want “trash poetry, nerdy poetry, horror poetry” and they don’t want ... Huh!? The “don’t want” part of their submission guidelines is gone. They must have edited it out while I was writing this blog entry. Weird and synchronicitous. Well, they used to not want nature poetry, but I guess it is alright now.

Aberration Labyrinth, as I said, is publishing great work, and that’s why I submitted, and because I love any zine that has done the impossible: become an original expression of the editors’ own predilections, madnesses, and quirks. They fuckin’ did it!

I also submitted because I am on the verge of psychosis from living in an unethical Empire of brain-dead sheep.

(Caveat: I automatically don’t like sexist, racist and so on, zines, but I don’t detect any of that).

Also, to submit you have to use their own personal submission system, which is called Green Submissions. It is fractious and obnoxious. The imp on my shoulder, which no one but me can see, has a theory: the zine is just a delivery device for testing and perfecting this newfangled submission system, which, once optimized, will be sold for tens of millions of dollars to a shadowy mogul in Silicon Valley.

I absolutely thank both these talented leaders, Gleason and Mohr, and their team of anonymous readers, for giving so much to the Scene, working very hard (I surmise) and launching a dangerously good new site.

Brave the Green Submission system and submit to them!!

Owl