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Allan Sokal is still being lionized for having scammed the review board of Social Text by submitting a parody of postmodern criticsm and having it published as the real thing. This was of course a prank - directed squarely at a certain leftist troublemaker and current ST Editorial Collective member named Andrew Ross.
Now we, quite by accident, have unearthed evidence of a similar act of yippie-like grandstanding - from a good two decades earlier, that's at least twice as funny! This past Halloween brought on our requisite visit to the Meadowlands for the Chiller convention. That's where we got handed a copy of Park Theater Confidential, a single issue tribute (by the publishers of Crystal Drum) to the Caldwell NJ movie house that burned down in 1974. The excerpt below is taken from page 50 of Park Theater Confidential. It's one of a five-part series of recollections that appear in the zine.
Only those who haunted the early 70s midnite movie circuit in Essex County NJ will remember the Park. Some of the cinegeeks who worked there had ties to Montclair State when it was still a college. A cluster of employees worked together on Galumph, the MS humor mag. As writer and Crystal Drum publisher Jeff Grimshaw puts it, there were a couple of problems with their setup. Practically everyone on staff was recruited from and putting the magazine together at the Park Theater rather than at MS. Worse, "A lot of people forget just how humorless the student radicals of the late sixties could be, especially student radicals of the late sixties who happened to have pretty much missed the late sixties by two or three years." The Student Government Association of MS began a campaign to shut down Galumph that eventally forced the publication off-campus entirely.
But that's not the kicker, which came about after the publication of a spurious "10th Anniversary Best of Galumph" ish, full of studiedly sophomoric gags ("We might as well have printed 50 pages of 'Fuck You.' Though in a sense, that's exactly what we did..."). Keep scrolling to experience the wonder, the millennial (or at least centennial) horror, the sheer bizarre joy of the all-too-true story of...An essential part of every joker's library!

GALUMPH part four: FUCKING LIARS AND ILLITERATE MORONS
by Jeff Grimshaw

...The Montclair State SGA [Student Government Association] just flipped out over the 10th anniversary Galumph, they threatened lawsuits, they wanted to pull the plug on the next issue, which was National Galumph, and they wanted to see the copy. To make sure it wasn't more of what they called 'private humor.' Chuck wouldn't show them a word, but he typed up pages of Henry Miller, Bruce Jay Friedman, he typed out the whole 'Cave of the Winds' sequence from Ulysses and said it was a Joyce parody (of course it was, but not in the sense he implied), he gave them 60 or 80 pages of this stuff -- S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Don Marquis, Harvey Kurtzman... all great stuff, and a lot of it not exactly obscure, though it was all attributed to Montclair State students. The SGA committee was supposed to read and evaluate this material, and report to the SGA on whether it was any good. I couldn't see the point of what Chuck was doing. He claimed the fix was in; "I'm giving them a fucking anthology of great 20th Century Humor, by some of the best writers who ever lived, and they're going to say it's all shit, watch." And that's exactly what happened; nobody on the committee recognized a word he gave them, they said it was all 'in-jokes' and not relevant to 'campus life' and 'badly written.' Chuck is sitting at this open session, listening to this litany, and he's asked if he has any response. "Did the committee read pages 8 through 14? Yes? They felt this story was badly written? Did I get that correctly? This badly written story is 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' by James Thurber, which can be found in the Norton Anthology of Literature..." and he went through the whole thing like that, and the whole time you've got these SGA officers screaming "You're OUT OF ORDER! You're OUT OF ORDER!" and Chuck screaming back, "You had your HORSE SHIT report written before you read any of this material, if you did read it, which I doubt, because you're a bunch of fucking liars and illiterate morons!" It was very entertaining, but possibly not the best way to have handled the situation, in retrospect...

END
Last updated on Wally Hartshorn's birthday - Nov. 9, 1999.
Note from Jennifer: This page originally hosted a rant by me that will reappear on a personal Web site at another server, currently under construction.
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