OCR Text |
Show Abbey teams with cartoonist R. Crumb in new edition of 'Monkey Wrench Gang' i . I i J !mrrncnnmant in 4 mmm9if1Ym N if ..lb'''' by Robin Moench The Monkey Wrench Gang, written by Edward Abbey, illustrated illustrat-ed by' R. Crumb. Dream Garden Press, 380 pp., $17.95. Remember R. Crumb? Remember the Zap Comix comic books of the late '60s? How about the big-footed Keep on Truckin' character char-acter of t-shirt fame? Or the Janis Joplin "Cheap Thrills' album cover of 1968? This isn't a quiz. But if all your responses so far have been negative, one thing we know for sure: You're not a veteran of the flower power-Vietnam conflict era. R, (Robert) Crumb is a cartoonist, and the above is or contains his work. His oddball style flourished when hippies were in bloom. The good news is he's back as illustrator of the 10th anniversary edition of Edward Abbey's comic novel on a deadly serious theme (environmental suicide), The Monkey Mon-key Wrench Gang. The bad news is, with just seven full-page drawings and the cover, there isn't enough of him. (In addition, there are more than 40 chapter heading sketches and incidental drawings. But, gee, they're just little Crumbs, when what you want is the entire cake. ) On the other hand, though the artwork may be sparser than you'd like, the text is bigger than you remember. (If you remember.) The anniversary book includes a chapter deleted from the original. Called "Seldom Seen at Home," it's a bad dream fantasy that fits the computer age like a digital readout. In fact, sections of it are printed in computer typography bold, skinny letters that are hard on the eyes. In case you missed the book the first time around (more than half a million copies are in print), here's the plot: ,, i .... Jj c; A quartet of environmental acty ists of wildly varying character unite years 01 comoaianu uuyii""vn. w return to the clear, clean desert of his dreams but "someone or something was changing things," he finds. Even the once-untouchable sky has become "a dump for the gaseous garbage of the copper smelters." And he's not the least bit happy about it. Doc Sarvis is a surgeon by day, a renegade beautifier of America by night. His idea of an evening on the town is nosing along the highway in his Lincoln Continental with a five-gallon can of gas, turning billboards into bonfires. "Everyone should have a hobby," he thinks. And last, Bonnie Abbzug, a Jew from the Bronx, holds a master's in French literature and advanced degrees in creative mayhem. The group financed by Doc, tempered by Seldom Seen, nagged by Abbzug, bullied by the rough-cut Hayduke plots and pillages its way into big trouble. And they're pursued by the tireless Bishop Love until their good deeding comes to an end in a canyon with no way out. But is their counter-culture war-waging war-waging over? The final chapter leaves the misfit gang, shrouded as always by night, contempt a renewal of their biggest dream the Glen Canyon Dam massacre. If your bad dream is hauling a camp stove and sleeping bag to the desert, only to find that last year's spot is this year's power plant or waste dump, you should read this book. And if you read it a decade ago, give it another look. How much, after all, has changed? In a press release issued last week by the Lake Powell recreational area, the reservoir was glowingly referred to as "the Grand Canyon with water." Crumb and Abbey are expected to attend an autograph party at the Cosmic Aeroplane bookstore on the U of U campus March 25. Call 533-9409 for more information. to fight the depradations of man, machine and bureaucratic pighead-edness pighead-edness on the Southwestern desert wilderness. Armed with dynamite and valiant ideals, the eco-brigade becomes the scourge of the Bureau of Land Management, the American logging industry, the National Park Service -and tour operators everywhere." " Their symbol is the simple but effective monkey wrench, and together to-gether they turn bridges into cascades of rubble and mint-clean bulldozers into screaming cliff divers. Who are these modem-day moralists moral-ists and nightriders of purple rage? Seldom Seen Smith is a jack Mormon, a professional guide and a wilderness outfitter. Recalling the many named and nameless canyons now submerged beneath the Colorado Color-ado River, he kneels in the center of the Glen Canyon Dam to pray for just "a little prc-cision earthquake right here." Lake Powell, the boatman's paradise, he calls " the blue death. ":, George Hayduke was a Green Beret in Vietnam.He survived three4 |