PUSH (a quarterly)
and SAID IT (a monthly)
Distributed locally, free.

In his fiction, Chekhov seemed to say that if you're not actively experiencing your suffering, then you're not really alive. A similar message echoes through PUSH, though poor old Chekhov would indeed have been bewildered by this edgy lesbian zine. The well-organized, well-thought-out forum features writing by local contributors slagging through the unpleasant and exhausting pain of prejudice from family and society. But the writing isn't cliché: It's honest and distinctly unsaccharine. PUSH also keeps its pages open to ideas that aren't necessarily acceptable or hip in the lesbian community; thus it works to stretch boundaries. Some contributors discuss desires for men, for example.

I think in some future time, the intrigue of "genderfuck" will evaporate as sexual preference, and other categories come to be less and less significant; however, for those interested, this zine has a fashionable interest in that department. The summer issue features a nice diary/confessional by Alix Kolar, who grew up with Middle Eastern and South Indian family roots. "Blurring the Lines" describes with easy candor Kolar's struggle with identity as a girl who has a yen for doing boy drag, packing, and other delights.

But the most interesting reading in the current issue is a thought-provoking interview by Franci Romeo with the director of the NW Network for Bisexual, Trans, and Lesbian Survivors of Abuse, Connie Burk. Impressive and dynamic, Burk discusses the complexities of human cruelty, including the benefits white women reap from racism and sexism.

SAID IT is a less accessible zine, though it contains some good international news and info. In the current issue, contributor Susan Lebow actually tries to make a case for women NOT carrying purses, backpacks, or bags of any kind, apparently finding American men superior creatures in this regard (men in Europe routinely carry purses); she urges women to model themselves after males by carrying wallets instead of bags. How quaint--blasts of feminism circa 1972! Sorry Missy, no way are women gonna give up our bags. How else will we carry our vibrators to our girlfriends' apartments? STACEY LEVINE

HERMAN MELVILLE
by Elizabeth Hardwick
(Penguin Lives) $19.95

Elizabeth Hardwick has written a delightfully breezy critical biography of Herman Melville. In the space of 155 pages, Hardwick wrests Melville scholarship from possessive academics and sets the work back in the lap of a spellbound readership. She joyfully scrapes away a century's worth of intellectual barnacles from the underbelly of the Great White Whale, and then she delivers artful insight about the autobiographical blueprint of its fervid construction. Hardwick's study should be passed out to English majors prior to their reading of Moby-Dick--lest they forget to have fun, lest they mistake an "unexpected masterpiece" for a bulky course requirement.

Hardwick, also a novelist, is at her most compelling and poetic when riffing on certain Melville creations: There's Ahab, "who has no ancestor in literature other than all of literature"; Starbuck, whose "clarity is the measure of his misery"; the scrivener Bartleby, "a master of language"; Billy Budd, "a creature of inborn moral sweetness"; Moby Dick, "ambiguously innocent as a virgin bride... a fictional creation of unparalleled inspiration." Like D. H. Lawrence before her, Hardwick is sublimely free-spirited in her evaluations of "poor Melville" and his work. Her type of criticism is truly precious: It instills a misplaced sense of awe, and plunges you back into the mystery of your own bookshelf. RICK LEVIN


LOST AND FOUND

BLIND AMBITION
by John Dean

(Pocket Books) Out of printIn 1973 I had crushes on two people: Eileen McCarthy, my second-grade playmate, and John W. Dean III, the former White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon. Eileen was a sweet girl who lived on Wilmett Road and wore a lot of plaid. Dean was a clean-cut young man with horn-rimmed glasses who spent a few summer days on national television, testifying about the criminality of the Nixon administration. They say that nobody likes a tattletale. Nobody but me, that is. John Dean, Serpico, Jeffrey Wigand, Anita Hill, Karen Silkwood: That's my list of American heroes, squealers all. I don't know why Dean got under my six-year-old skin, but he's stayed there, as the guy who finally got sick of doing Nixon's dirty work.

In 1976 Dean published Blind Ambition, a tell-all memoir that sold a zillion quickly discarded copies and got made into a TV miniseries with Martin Sheen (terrible choice) as Dean. If you think the crazy book about early '70s politics is Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, try this one. The banal insanity of Dean's White House career makes that hophead Thompson look like Brit Hume: Nixon calling Dean in for an Oval Office meeting with some college newspaper editors because he thinks Dean looks "hippie"; G. Gordon Liddy shredding the soap bar wrappers he stole from the Watergate and telling Dean on a D.C. street corner, "If somebody wants to shoot me, I'm prepared to have that done. You just let me know when and where, and I'll be there." I wanted it to go on forever. TOM NISSLEY