Sunday, September 8, 2013


Here's one of my "lost" works that was never discovered in the first place. And some praise:


I really can't remember the last time I read an extended work in one sitting. Vernon Frazer's Commercial Fiction is a great book, a book I've always felt someone should write, thinking maybe I would do it at some point--and now I don't have to. Vernon Frazer taken the shallow, mind-numbing world of mass communication and used it against itself, appropriating its techniques and making them work as fiction, as a text that can inspire intelligent reflection rather than consumer idiocy. At the same time, he's taken the possibility of media critique through fiction and shown that it's already trapped in precisely what it intends to subvert. Yet he makes this work as an aspect of the critique, since his position as meta-author is ultimately outside the pseudo-maelstrom of commodity capitalism and its image system. Or is it? By spilling past the putative closure implied by his meta-authorial perspective, Frazer forces us to confront the possibility that any "victory" over mass imagery is dubious. And Vernon Frazer makes it all so much fun. I blew snot repeatedly. I loved the monster movie references at the end. And the transformations, juxtapositions, the shifts in levels of "reality" that occurred throughout.

---Stephen-Paul Martin
Author,Changing the Subject