A Steamshovel Press Reader
Edited by Kenn Thomas
Illuminet Press 1995
Available in the UK from AK Distribution at £17.95(1)
This is the first twelve issues of Steamshovel Press plus issue 13, which never appeared in magazine format. I like Steamshovel – I’ve written a couple of pieces for more recent issues – and I enjoyed this enormously. Steamshovel is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t read it because it contains a mixture of material which has no equivalent in the UK. No. 10, for example contains this sequence of articles: a piece about Gerald Posner’s Case Closed; a piece called ‘Secret Service Masers Kill and Make Whores’ about implants and mind control programmes of the US government, which ought to be a spoof but probably isn’t; an interview with a man called Lars Hansson which covers the actor Steven Seagal’s odd connections, an alleged CIA assassin who claims to have killed 117 people for the US government between 1943 and 1990, and Gordon Novel and John Lear; a piece called ‘Thieves of Knowledge: The Vanishing of the Place of Muses’ about the destruction of the library at Alexandria circa 400 A.D.; Jim Keith on a UFO book; and a piece about Carroll Quigley. OK, not all the issues have quite this kind of subject spread, but you might get the drift.
The nearest UK equivalent would be the underground press of the late sixties and early seventies. Thomas’s heroes are the likes of Timothy Leary, Wilhem Reich and Robert Anton-Wilson, and you might find a copy of Oz or IT which had pieces about two of those three. (Anton-Wilson appeared a little later.) This is probably why I like it: that’s the stuff I grew up on. But the UK underground press didn’t have Steamshovel‘s huge input of conspiracy theories. Steamshovel also has the faults as well as the virtues of the UK underground press. Oz and IT and the rest were fascinating but hardly reliable sources, and Steamshovel isn’t the place to look for information in the way that Peter Dale Scott or Covert Action Quarterly are. Thomas may be as concerned that something be interesting as he is that it be true. But most of it is interesting.
Where I would print a section from Peter Dale Scott, Thomas is going to print an interview with Kerry Thornley, Oswald’s prankster buddy in the Marine Corps. He runs pieces by somebody who calls him or herself X. Sharks Despot. He takes people like John Judge, the late Mae Brussel and Jim Keith much more seriously than I do. It’s just a different take on the whole parapolitical thing. But why not?
This is 350 almost A4-sized pages. I would be surprised if you didn’t find at least half a dozen pieces of serious interest.
Notes
- AK’s address is given in the Sources section below.