Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726

Pif Magazine
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"Art as crime; crime as art."

I steal from Border's. I use my height to my advantage. I lift to-be pilfered book to the top of my head and bounce it against the back of my skull thoughtfully to pass it above the crime detectors (ironic that they are magnetic: in this case opposites do not attract).

Here's a rule: the best poetic terrorism is against the law, but don't get caught.

I give back to Border's too. When I get pissed at a book for its banality - a Nicholson Baker's The Fermata, for example, or an Ethan Canin (you choose) or a T.C. Boyle — I tear out pages, tear off halves to staple back together in no discriminate order, make origami, add words in paper-seeping black marker ("AMNESTY FOR PIGS" or "KILROY LEFT US BEHIND ALREADY"). I leave the cover the same, pristine and unread and apparently sellable.

Vandalize only what must be defaced.

These sculptures of graffitized blanderture I then leave on Border's bookshelves in proper order. Let someone with some inkling of submitting himself to Barth's On With the Story (which convicted itself in my literary trial with its first redundant echoing of Jack's boorish obsession with Scheherezade) be accosted through the senses with the realization that he holds in his hand a poetic terrorist object.

Poetic terrorism is not done for other artists: "Do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art."

Let him revile the heresy and let him be thwarted in his bloated attempt at the literary. Let him pull up allusions to book burning and banning. May he then read a banned book, though I would not dream of suggesting which one.

Poetic terrorism ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror — powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst...

But perhaps there is not all that much of a polarity between me and big business Border's as I have suggested. I have never absconded from Barnes & Noble, the next big chain up the block. And they are no less guilty of commodified creativity and the worse crime of ignorant merchants who can tell you more of what's on sale than what was the last book they found that left trails of warm grease making parallel lines from the corners of their mouths. I target Border's, yet I spend hours there sucking down chai and scrawling in acid-free sketchbooks (stolen from the bargain table, which makes me feel guilty because who wants to steal that crap anyway?) and getting friendly with the help. I went gaga for the café countergirl who had actually read The Wrestler's Cruel Study and Barthelme's Sixty Stories. I made sappy advances at her between biscotti. Love always has its own bag of poetic terroristic tricks to fuck your brain. If you haven't been stupid for a literate redhead my friend, don't dross my path unless you're decked in a little riot gear. That, or stay clear of the goddamn coffee shop.

Don't worry. My passion lies not only in destructive force. I made a raid on the local college bookstore when, back in Florida, my professor Marjorie Sandor glumly announced that her book had been remaindered. "Makes a cheap Christmas gift," she said. "At least you can get it signed."

All I needed to hear. Off I went to have at the creature that dared label itself an "official" bookstore. I lifted up a pile of Sandors for $2.99 per and let them drop audibly to the counter.

"It's a shame," I declared, "that such a fine writer as Marjorie Sandor should be bought so cheaply." I looked with disdain at the overpriced textbook section. "With all this drivel, you'd think something worth something to this world could earn a modicum of respect." (My dealings with Beckett at the time was definitely affecting my speech.) My point made, I left noisily. Later, as Marjorie dedicated the books to anyone I could think of, Michael, a fellow graduate student, entered empty-handed.

"I just thought you'd want to know," he said, "that I tried to get one of your books, but when I asked at the bookstore why they didn't have any more copies, they said Richard K. Weems had come by." Hurricane K. Weems would have been more like it, fucking Tsunami Weems. The store was wrecked worse than a trailer park with a bulls-eye painted on top of every doublewide, the name of their destroyer etched onto their hearts, even though I never identified myself and paid only with cash.

Perhaps there is already an FBI file out on me. I gave Michael a copy that was dedicated to Thurgood Marshall — a nice-sounding name. Definitely worth being dedicated to.

My greatest enemy, what stirs me to plan action, is what I fear the most — complacency. It is easy to continue with book theft now that I've mastered the technique; easy to tear into books, easy to ridicule authors I've ridiculed before. But to not allow change and appreciation and growth of terroristic techniques and targets is not to admit that the world is empty, malleable and revisionist. The present affects the future. The future affects the past. The past over time becomes more and more different from how we remember it. It is not enough anymore to desecrate the easy targets, never enough to say only "Nay." Love is as strong a passion as terror, and for all my banter on the banal I can sit and laugh sincerely as Disney's Hercules plays (without sound) on a video store wall or actually find myself enjoying a story by John Updike.

Still, not narrowing down one's field of enemies is always a wise choice, for there are always targets to be had. For the photos taken during an interview with a very stuck-up and WASPy feng shui "expert," I'm the guy in the back with his hand on his chin, his middle finger pressed deliberately against his cheek, his eyes also subtly flipping the bird.

‡ All quotes and summaries of Poetic Terrorism come from the essay of the same name by Hakim Bey – T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism; Autonomedia, 1991.

Richard Weems teaches at a high school in easy reach of a go-go and a quaint old bar run by an equally old dame named Francis who keeps a rocking chair by the taps. He also teaches fiction writing at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

His second tattoo is official, and now he knows how addictive they are. Numbers three and four are already envisioned, though no piercings have entered his mind yet. Nothing, however, is certain.