Manifesto

Manifesto

November 3, 2008, 7:30 pm
Filed under: 001, Fall 2008

By Evan Dardano

There is a tiny white book, anonymously penned and published, called Manifesto on the shelves of comic shops and other trendily obscure places, a tiny book about a stoned depressed modern Holden Caulfield who hitchhikes across America criticizing everything, getting drunk, and crying. Its binding is simple and the cover blank. There are no chapters, there is no plot, and the story’s timeline is as bent, scattered, and fragmented as its caustic narrator. Its structure is prose, more or less, and one could justifiably call it an anti-novel, but there are no clues to determine whether it is fact or fiction. It is a familiar story of the angst, loneliness, and improvable superiority complexes that plague the white upper-middle-class protagonists of so many independent films and young prose.

      Assembled in directionless, minimalist vignettes as though it were originally conceived on Post-It notes, the text grinds and roils like a stomach battered by scotch and nicotine. It is frustrating, compelling, and beautifully sad. In five years there will be a Master’s thesis on its brutal, simplistic delivery, and somebody will compare it to Hemingway. Someone else will call it the ranting of a spoiled, angry manchild. And every word of it may be true. The narrator may have vomited in the woods behind your house. He might be real and he might be sitting next to you. If art is to hold a mirror to the world, Manifesto did so to mine one summer when I was stoned and drunk and younger and swept up in its poignant angst. That the individual responsible for Manifesto is out there, somewhere, has become for me a catalyst of immense anxiety and obsession. If, according to the book, the primordial stirrings of an intellectual revolution are beginning, the anonymous author and publishers must be reachable, in some way, for comment. 

      A red flyer pokes out from the middle of the book, revealing a list of the story’s influences and pseudo-poetic snippets such as “dream HUGE dreams” and general advice falling somewhere between sentimental and cloudily anarchic: “FAIRNESS TO THE SHITTY WORLD,” or “if you don’t like the government – be the government.” It also includes contact information for the publisher, dedrabbit – a phone number, website, email address, and post box in Northampton, Massachusetts – but the mystery of Manifesto is seemingly being guarded like a pile of nihilistic treasure. The website is an international list of bookshops that carry the book, many of which only received one copy from unmarked envelopes, if at all. “CALL THE NUMBER BELOW BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO KILL YOURSELF,” it reads. Calling yields endless ringing or the cheery Sprint PCS robotlady’s voice. Sadly, she does not return calls or acknowledge voicemails, and months worth of emails have gone unanswered.

      Manifesto has earned itself a handful of underwhelmed online reviews and a neglected thread on the SomethingAwful.com forums, where a user claims that an ex had met the author and that the book is true, but he was unavailable for further comments. Greg Swan of PerfectPorridge.com reviewed the book, and addressed its air of mystery via email: “I was mailed Manifesto in an unmarked envelope and don’t recall the postmark. After reading and reviewing it, I mailed it to my friend in Maui. My friend gave it to a homeless guy whom he shared a few nights with in an abandoned van on Willie Nelson’s beach. That book is purely viral in the most physical of sense.” Greg never got an email response from dedrabbit either.

      Liz, of the Newbury Comics in Norwood knew “very little, other than it sells really well. It’s elusive.” Aaron, another store manager, was sheepish and mostly polite, wearing a modest brown polo shirt and a chirping yellow nametag hung on a lanyard emblazoned with pins of every band that has reigned over college radio charts in the last several years. He called a woman named Michelle. Their conversation was hushed and marginally discreet with the tones of an inside joke, like the Manifesto phone call happens regularly. He chuckled to Michelle while peeking out from behind a display of anti-government pins and vibrant plastic sunglasses, as though trying not to be heard or seen. He hung up the phone and reported that “Management is not willing to release that information.” Willing. Michelle is the buyer for the company and presumably had, at least at one point, direct contact with dedrabbit in order to arrange sale of the book. Her voice is maternal and suggestive of sarcasm, but she is direct and polite as she states that she will not disclose the names of anyone involved with the book, but that she does have regular email contact with dedrabbit, who will “surely get in touch with young investigators if you email them.”

      Maybe there are fewer corporate obstacles in the liberal, artistic nest of Northampton, where the story seems to have been born.

      On the lazy stretch of the Mass Pike toward the Hamptons, an elderly couple pulled over at a rest area, beckoned by the glowing plus-sized sirens of Gulf/McDonald’s logos. If Manifesto’s author is true to his word, this couple had likely planted their puffy white shoes on the same pavement on which the protagonist has tread, slept, and urinated. If the narrator is real he would hate these shuffling old people. He would also hate the bustling Amherst Center on a Saturday afternoon, where the silent war of transitional seasons went on all around. Leaves smattered with orange fell over college students lounging on benches eating giant slices of pizza while a middle-aged man with a glistening sequined gold cape kept a beat with a plastic bucket and sang “The Monster Mash” to pedestrians for money. In Amherst, Manifesto isn’t very mysterious. Every bookstore in the center of town that carries the book shrugged a similar response, “It just showed up here,” but there were answers at a tiny used record store, tucked away behind a tattoo parlor, away from the homeless monster masher and hipsters with pizza grease on their fingertips.

      The cashier at Mystery Train Records sat on a stool, her gaze calmly drifting out the windows at the newly turned leaves while two modestly-dressed men in their thirties browsed tarnished punk vinyls, and she said that her manager met “the kid asking us to carry the book,” but that he was at lunch, check back later.

      Josh Burkette, absorbed in a laptop, stomach full, was quiet like a serene dormouse. The book did not seem particularly strange to him, or worthy of obsession, but he explained what he knew.

      “I never actually met the kid. He emails me… dedrabbit at yahoo. I’m sure it’s the author. I think he graduated from Hampshire College a couple years ago. People say they’ve seen him in Northampton passing out the book saying things like ‘Here, take this. You need this book.’ That sort of thing.” He seemed amused as he recalled this, and that was all he could say.

      But Josh Burkette knew a lot about the man that he emails only casually. And he never made any eye contact, barely looked away from his laptop, and he shuffled anxiously while he spoke, as though he were within the scope of a sniper rifle that listeners were not meant to detect, as though there were more to the story.

      So there is no underground art movement, no graffiti-smeared basement meeting area, just a stoned young man from Northampton with a poetic virus to share. This is nothing special. The search for a collective of artists and tragic revolutionaries is over, and dedrabbit’s invisible revolution is just one man’s idea. “Make your dreams come true/don’t be realistic/everything is possible/ENNUI IS THE ENEMY”, “the revolution is in your head”, “life impends”, “the frozen world thaws”, reads the red flyer. “The collective is in your head.” The invisible revolution is anyone’s to claim.

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