Edsel Relic, a performance poet who has just been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, receives an invitation from his unrequited highschool love to attend his 25th school class reunion. In his internal debate whether to go, he reassesses his life as a teenage outsider seeking refuge in the jazz life through a series of hallucinatory episodes that include cameo appearances by Walter Cronkite.
"...a very worthy written equivalent of improvisational jazz... I really enjoyed this novel. It’s a very good story for those of us whose high school memories are less than happy. It also belongs right up there with the best of people like Jack Kerouac"
STAY TUNED TO THIS CHANNELA finalist in the 1996 Black Ice/FC2 Fiction Contest, Stay Tuned to this Channel explores the terra incognita of cutting-edge fiction in thirteen stories as accessible as they are adventurous. Frazer's narrative techniques create a mixed-media surrounding of the senses through which a wit whips from antic to acidic at the turn of a phrase. In the course of challenging conventional assumptions about what constitutes reality, Stay Tuned to This Channel seeks---and finds---a heightened reality whose distortions present a pointed reflection of daily life in America's commodity-driven culture.
"...like Bartheleme or Chris Mazza, with a strong sense of fun, of what to do with text... The best of what Beat might have become is becoming now through Vernon Frazer."
---Don Webb, A SPELL FOR THE FULFILLMENT OF DESIRE
An author writing Commercial Fiction while working for a government agency awakens in such a disoriented state that he can’t tell if he’s writing at work or at home. His attempts to regain his sense of reality whirl him through a wonderland of hilariously conceived characters and situations. The host of a morning television program commits suicide on the air, then becomes an omnipresent advertising spokesman in what may or may not be his afterlife. The professional Role Model who replaces the host in mid-program follows his own trite advice to achieve literal overnight success. A beautiful file clerk works her way to the top in one day—scrupulously or unscrupulously, only her conscience knows for sure. Meanwhile, the author teams up with Big Brother to keep the subliminal codes that control the American way of life from falling into the hands of an enemy gaining power and strength. Commercial Fiction’s supporting cast includes sex-addicted government officials, silicon-enhanced TV stars, gun-running charity workers, soap opera actors and other unforgettable characters driven to desperate acts in their pursuit of power, money, and love.
" It's 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. You've 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,
you've taken the possibility of media critique through fiction and shown
that it's already trapped in precisely what it intends to subvert. Yet
you make this work as an aspect of the critique, since your 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 your meta-authorial perspective, you force us to
confront the possibility that any "victory" over mass imagery is
dubious. And you make it all so much fun. 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
Instead of Confusion